


Part of the Whole Design

by nightbloomingcereus



Series: Dreaming Spires (the Oxford-verse) [1]
Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Academia, Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Human, Alternate Universe - Professors, Crowley POV, M/M, Oxford, Paris (City), Pining, Podfic Available, Professors, Six thousand DAYS of pining, author's love letter to Oxford, many tangential observations about the trials and tribulations of life in academia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-16
Updated: 2019-09-21
Packaged: 2020-09-01 21:21:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 26,114
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20264692
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nightbloomingcereus/pseuds/nightbloomingcereus
Summary: Crowley meets Aziraphale for the first time in Paris, where they spend a day and a night together.  It's 6,000 days before they meet again, as professors at Oxford.Human/Academia AU.





	1. City of lights

**Author's Note:**

> So this started out as me just wanting to write a meet-cute in Paris, and then somehow became this whole, huge multi-chaptered thing with angst and pining and backstory and possibly even an actual plot. This entire thing is very self-indulgent and full of oddly specific things that I love, and it is eating my life and I love it. I hope you love it too.
> 
> Playlist for this fic can be found [here](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0aDRhgtUZUHx4kgVZ6ZDZ5?si=KhW8r5XfRxiCuxcF9FC8sQ).
> 
> Update (March 2020): There is now a podfic of this work by the incredibly talented [CompassRose](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CompassRose/profile)! You can find it [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23159131).

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A chance first meeting in Paris. A day and a night.

_But night is the cathedral where we recognized the sign._  
_We strangers know each other now as part of the whole design._

\--Suzanne Vega, _Gypsy_

**Paris, 2002**

If you're a graduate student in the UK, it's practically a rite of passage to spend your weekends on the Continent, and most particularly in Paris. Flights are shockingly cheap if you keep an eye out for good deals, and it's possible to live very well for a weekend in Paris on only a few euros. Paris has a strange, serendipitous magic: it's almost better (or at least more romantic, which in the mind of the idealistic student is basically the same thing) to be poor in Paris. It's a cliché, of course, same as the one about falling in love here, but then again most clichés are rooted in truth if you're not afraid to embrace them.

Anthony J. Crowley is fresh out of university, just starting a DPhil program in Astrophysics at Cambridge, and, for the moment at least, blissfully free. He’d arrived in Paris that morning (a perfect, sunny, early autumn Saturday, another cliché), and had immediately gone exploring. Here, he's just another anonymous student melting into the narrow streets with a small bag containing little more than a change of clothes on his shoulder. If anybody notices that he is wearing his sunglasses indoors, they chalk it up to the folly of youth, the triumph of the necessity to look cool at all times over practical concerns. He wanders into an old bookshop, one of those quintessentially Parisian stores that looks like it could have been there, unchanging and timeless, since the Reign of Terror. Inside, it is cool and dim, and smells of dusty old books and a hint of incense. The shelves reach up to the ceiling, with one of those old-fashioned library ladders to access them. He has a vague idea of looking for the astronomy books because this is the kind of place that might have old copies of Galileo’s treatises and things like that, even if he would never be able to afford them. He turns the corner and walks into someone who is standing in the next aisle, engrossed in a book. 

The person is a boy a little shorter than he is, and a bit stouter, with a head of ethereal looking blond curls so pale they are almost white, and is dressed in a fussy looking beige waistcoat and bow tie. Somehow the look suits him, and he fits into this bookshop in a way that Crowley, in his skinny black jeans, combat boots, and vintage Queen concert tee, definitely does not. He is absorbed in a book, and only looks up when Crowley bumps right into him and makes an indeterminate "ngk" sound. 

“Oh! Oh, I’m sorry, my dear!,” the boy exclaims, flustered, in English, with an unmistakably British accent. He reminds Crowley a little bit of the White Rabbit. It's oddly endearing.

Crowley himself feels a bit flustered as well, although he doesn't quite know why. It figures that the very first person he meets in France turns out to be some prim and proper Englishman. He means to apologize as well, but what comes out of his mouth is, “You’re British!”

“Yes, just nipped across the channel for the weekend. Really fancied myself some crepes. And yourself?”

“Same,” he replies, “Well, not so much with the crepes. But yes. Just popped over for the weekend. What’s that you’re reading? Kierkegaard?”

And so Crowley meets Aziraphale. The book that Aziraphale was perusing turns out to be _The Sickness Unto Death_. They've both really only read Kierkegaard in Intro to Philosophy classes in university, but, with the naïve hubris that only the young and self-proclaimed intellectual have, they nevertheless fall into a spirited debate over the concept of demonic despair and what it might mean in the context of fate and free will. They continue to talk as they leave the store (Aziraphale squealing over three or four more books on the way out and bemoaning his lack of cash to purchase them with), blinking in the sudden spill of bright mid-morning sunlight. Philosophy becomes literature becomes history becomes theology becomes everything else. Everything, that is, except the mundane details of their lives back home. They have told each other their first names (Crowley generally hates using his first name, but he doesn't want to have to answer any awkward questions if Aziraphale recognizes his last name, so he offers the much more mundane "Anthony" when asked). They are both graduate students (Aziraphale is reading English at Oxford). Something about the particular magic of Paris leads them both to the unspoken accord that they don’t want to know more than this about each other’s real lives, that too much knowledge inevitably leads to a fall. It is better this way, to spend the day awash in serendipity and a little mystery. 

They wander for hours with no specific destination in mind, stopping at a boulangerie to buy a baguette (and a _chausson aux pommes _for Aziraphale) and eating it on a park bench with nothing but mustard and a bottle of cheap but delicious white wine in the grand tradition of all poor students who come to Paris. They toss the crumbs to the ducks in the pond nearby. He learns that Aziraphale is fond of snakes but hates frogs, that he finds Elizabeth Taylor creepy for some reason, that his favorite Shakespeare play is Hamlet. Crowley himself likes birds but doesn't get along with horses, is unaccountably freaked out by Benedict Cumberbatch, and prefers the funny Shakespeare plays, with Much Ado About Nothing being his particular favorite. They pass by Notre Dame, and he discovers that Aziraphale loves churches, loves the stained glass and the music and the hushed reverence of it all. Crowley can't say the same for himself; churches make him twitchy and nervous, and the black and white distinction between Good and Evil has always seemed like a false dichotomy to him. Aziraphale is kind enough not to insist that they go inside, which is a kind of courtesy that Crowley has so rarely experienced that he is astonished. They climb to the top of the Arc de Triomphe and gaze down at the boulevards and alleys of Paris, spread out like the rays of a sun. They both agree that it is silly and too touristy to climb to the top of the Eiffel Tower (and both of them are perhaps just a little too lazy to want to negotiate all those stairs anyway), but they do sit on the grass below it for a while to watch the world go by and make a game of trying to identify the dozens of foreign languages they hear. Aziraphale gets his crepes, buttery and sweet with caramelized sugar and with a perfect amount of freshness and acidity from the lemon, from a street vendor by the Jardin du Luxembourg, and pronounces them absolutely divine. Crowley inspects the plants in the garden and watches Aziraphale daintily lick sugar and butter off his fingers; he hadn't wanted a crepe, but now he wants nothing more than to taste the caramel on Aziraphale's fingers and on his lips. They pass by the Ritz, and Aziraphale says, sighing, that he'd like to dine there someday. In a charming, nameless café, they drink tiny cups of thick, rich hot chocolate. They stumble into another quintessentially anachronistic Parisian shop, this one selling secondhand jewelry, and pick out tiny lapel pins for each other: a coiled snake for Crowley and a pensive owl for Aziraphale. A brief but intense rainstorm blows in that afternoon, and they huddle together under Aziraphale’s tartan umbrella as they make a break for the nearest café, where they order tea for Aziraphale and coffee for Crowley and watch the raindrops splatter on the windows before, suddenly, miraculously, the sun reappears and casts the rain-fresh streets in glistening silver. They share ice cream, one scoop of chocolate and one of vanilla, on the Pont Neuf. Day bleeds into night, the bells of Notre Dame tolling each hour in the distance. They meander along the banks of the Seine, and watch the reflection of the Eiffel Tower come alight in its waters. They have a spirited debate about dolphins and Oscar Wilde over a carafe of the unnamed but very decent house red wine and a shockingly inexpensive and excellent three-course _prix fixe _meal at a little bistro on the Left Bank. The moon rises, round and full. Aziraphale quotes poetry by heart to him, and he shows Aziraphale the constellations that appear one by one in the night sky. He says that if they weren't in the city, but somewhere darker and less light polluted, the South Downs perhaps, they'd be able to see so many more stars, maybe even the Milky Way; he tells him, grandiosely, that he's going to discover a new star, and name it after Aziraphale, which is an appropriately poetic and weighty name. They speak of Greek mythology, and Roman history, and Renaissance painters. At some point their hands find each other and neither is willing to be the first to let go. He has never felt so known in all his life. 

They're standing, facing each other, closer than they need to be, on a quiet street somewhere near _Les Invalides _sometime around midnight. It's far away enough from the main commercial thoroughfares, and late enough, that there's no one else around. Crowley's right hand is still in Aziraphale's left. Aziraphale brings his other hand up, brushes his thumb across Crowley's left cheekbone, and asks, softly, "May I?" Crowley nods, and Aziraphale moves his hand up to pluck the sunglasses from his face. He ordinarily hates it when people can see his eyes, partly because of their strange, pale amber, almost yellow color and partly because he knows that they are too expressive, that they always reveal his innermost emotions, but right now he doesn't mind that Aziraphale wants to see them. He _wants _him to see them. 

"Oh Anthony…," whispers Aziraphale, "They're beautiful." Crowley doesn't know if he means the color or the look that he's sure is in them, but he believes him.

“Angel,” he breathes in the millimeters between their lips, right before Aziraphale kisses him, softly and sweetly, his hands wound around Crowley's neck, twining in Crowley’s hair. He tastes sweet, like burnt sugar and chocolate and moonlight, and Crowley never wants this night, this kiss, to end.

“Where are you staying, my dear?” whispers Aziraphale, without letting go.

“Nowhere really. I hadn’t gotten that far yet. Figured I’d find a hostel or something.”

“I have a room nearby. Stay with me. If you want, that is.” His smile is shy, small, suddenly uncertain, but when Crowley nods his assent, happiness singing inside his chest, it breaks into a full-faced, joyous, exuberant thing as he grabs Crowley’s hand and all but drags him down the street. Crowley thinks he wants to make Aziraphale smile that smile again, over and over until the end of the world. He thinks he'd stop the end of the world from happening just to keep seeing it.

Aziraphale’s hotel room is a tiny, cramped thing, up on the top floor of an old Parisian building with peeling paint and a narrow, creaky staircase. The small bed is nestled into an alcove under the sloping wood beams of the roof. Shutters blow slowly back and forth in the breeze from the open window. It's silver with moonlight when they enter, and they do not bother to turn on the lights. It's perfect. Aziraphale’s fingers are soft as he drags them slowly down the entire length of Crowley's spine. His mouth is pleasantly cool and yet sets Crowley’s skin to burning. His body pressed against Crowley’s is a revelation of soft, warm curves fitted against Crowley's own long and slender planes. It's like falling, or flying, or maybe both at once. They share the single feather pillow, flame-red and white-gold hair mingling against its whiteness. Afterward, Aziraphale presses a soft, cool kiss to his sweat-sheened collarbone, and he curls himself around Aziraphale, unwilling to lose any point of contact with his skin, and falls asleep. 

When he awakens to the too-bright, early light of dawn and the mundane sound of morning traffic streaming through the open window, Aziraphale is gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I realize it's a bit of a stretch to assume that anyone would have had an opinion on Benedict Cumberbatch in 2002, but I really wanted to make that joke so let's just assume Crowley does, 'kay?


	2. Six thousand days

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Six thousand days of pining. Many things change in Crowley's life, but some things are constants.

Years pass. Crowley saunters vaguely in the direction of scientific progress and eventually gets his doctorate, then spends a number of aggravating but ultimately productive years doing post-doctoral research and teaching a godforsaken introductory physics course. These things, as things in academia always go, take far longer than he'd thought they would when he was twenty-two. 

At some point early on, he becomes obsessed with Alpha Centauri, two stars so close together that they appear to be one to the naked eye, erratically orbiting a single fixed point. (Of course he has to make things difficult for himself. He’s an academic after all. You can’t even see Alpha Centauri from anywhere north of the twenty-ninth parallel, which means that not a single observational study can be done anywhere in England.) He builds a career out of studying the origins of Alpha Centauri and other binary stars, and lately has become interested in understanding how this single small origin story might relate to the much larger question of the beginnings of the universe itself. 

He’s lost his taste for travel, although he still does it for conferences and collaborations, as needs must. He does beg off of every conference in Paris, which his fellow students and post-docs don't really mind because it means one of them gets to go in his place. Instead, he saves his money and buys a car, a vintage Bentley, and spends a lot of time restoring, maintaining, and otherwise tinkering with it. He drives like a madman, and everyone says he must have the luck of the devil, because he never gets into an accident or even gets a speeding ticket. In reality, he's an excellent driver and nobody really believes that a car _that old _can go _that fast_, anyway.

One day after a particularly aggravating dissertation committee meeting, he downs two bottles of red wine and ends up getting a snake tattooed on his face, directly below his right temple. Surprisingly, he doesn't regret it at all the next morning. It matches the tiny snake pin he wears constantly, on the lapel of his now-signature black blazer. People see the snake tattoo, the sharp blazer with the flash of red under the collar, the impractically skinny black jeans, the near-constant sunglasses, the succession of trendy hairstyles, and automatically assume he's a flash bastard. He can't really say he minds, even though the truth is that he spends his days in the lab and most of his nights alone on his couch. 

Someone gives him a houseplant as a gift, just a generic fern of some sort, and he realizes that he enjoys cultivating plants and is in fact quite good at it. It's nice, after hours spent staring at images of distant celestial bodies and abstract strings of data on computer screens, to go home and look at something green and earthbound. Sometimes he talks to the plants; it's mostly admonishments to _grow better or else _but occasionally, especially after a bottle or two of wine, it's softer things, more secret things. It's cheaper than therapy, and plants won't talk back or reveal his secrets. He starts frequenting botanical gardens and greenhouses and arboretums, and, like all true amateur horticulturalists, he can't help but surreptitiously snip cuttings of the more interesting and exotic specimens. (He always leaves a donation when he leaves though. He's not a monster.) 

He stops believing he knows anything about philosophy, even though he's actually read more of Kierkegaard now. He stops believing he'll discover new galaxies, even though he's become competent at actually identifying celestial bodies rather than just dreaming about them. He doesn't stop believing in love at first sight, even though he wishes he could.

He’s managed mostly to maintain only the minimum of contact with his family, and they seem to be buying the line that his current research will be helpful for the family business. (In reality, Crowley's research is on the origins of the universe and the formation of stars and galaxies, which is pretty far from having any practical application at all, much less to corporate espionage. On the other hand, he has written a number of grant applications over the years, and a little creative writing suggesting a vague connection between cosmic radiation and communications satellites turns out to be useful both for getting research funding and for getting one's family off one's back. Also, it doesn’t really take much to make the concept of dark matter seem sinister.) He sometimes hears about them on the news or on gossip sites – the hot topic du jour is that Lucifer Morningstar, his uncle and the head of the family business, is currently embroiled in a particularly sordid paternity suit involving the son of the American Ambassador to England, and there are a lot of shocking tell-all interviews with a woman, Mary somebody, who claims that when she was a nun, of all things, she was involved in some complicated baby-swapping scheme involving not just the Ambassador's son but two other baby boys. He still occasionally gets recognized for his part in an earlier scandal involving his family, but has managed to keep himself out of the public eye for long enough that the media have mostly forgotten about him.

In all those years, he can’t forget Paris, can’t forget Aziraphale. He tries to convince himself it was just a one night stand. Which, technically, it was. A one-night stand and the one glorious day that preceded it and a kind of bone-deep intimacy that he's never felt with anyone else before or since. Anyway, just a one night stand.

And yet. He thinks of him every time he hears cathedral bells, every time he smells crepes, every time he gets caught in the rain without an umbrella. He wants to ask him why he left without waking him, without saying goodbye or leaving a note; he wants to ask him how he could have been so sure that whatever connection (and he knows it was real, he has never felt that way about anyone before or since) they had in Paris could never survive the real world, their real and messy lives. He wants to show him all the stars in the night sky from the chalk hills of the South Downs. He dreams about him, and wakes up hard and wanting and so, so alone.

He has tried over the years to find Aziraphale on the Internet. His first name is uncommon enough, after all, that the fact that he doesn't know his last name probably doesn't matter. However, Google tells him that Aziraphale is an obscure angel who is apparently mentioned in passing in some rare misprint versions of the Bible and is really only of interest to serious theological scholars. (_And what even is a Principality anyway, _he remembers thinking.) There is no mention of a beautiful boy (or a man now, he supposes) who loves crepes and old books and with soft hands and a smile like the sun. He is, somehow, not at all surprised that Aziraphale doesn't seem to exist in the digital world. 

He dates, or tries to, but he has no patience for things like small talk and awkward get-to-know-you coffee dates. He wants someone with whom he has an instant connection, someone with whom he will be discussing ducks or Shakespeare or the history of British counterintelligence within five minutes of their meeting. He’s drawn to academic types, slightly fussy, well-mannered men who fancy tweed and waistcoats and bow ties. He has a thing for perfectly manicured hands. All of these men, though, fall short sooner or later. Not one of them has told him that his eyes are beautiful. None of them smiles at him like the sun coming out after forty days and forty nights of rain. One or two of them turns out to be just plain insufferable and self-involved, which is always a risk with the patently academic type. Sometimes he sleeps with them, never after the first date (he's only ever done that once, in Paris when he was twenty-two) but after the second, or the third. He never lets them spend the night. It's a thing to do to pass the time, and is enjoyable, he supposes, although sometimes things go all pear-shaped. 

“Aziraphale!,” he cries out once, in the height of passion. 

His partner, whose name he suddenly can’t remember, replies automatically, “Bless you!”

Crowley goes suddenly, blindingly cold. He shoves the man away from him, despite his angry protests, demands in a choked voice that he leave, and buries his face in his hands and sobs. 

And so it goes, for six thousand days. 


	3. Tea for two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Crowley gets his dream job and finally sees his dream man again, but some uncomfortable revelations come to light.

**2019**

Six thousand days (or a bit more than sixteen years, for the less obsessive) pass before Crowley finds Aziraphale again. 

When he had just been starting out as a student, he'd naively imagined that he'd be comfortably settled into his first faculty position, running his own lab, by the time he was thirty, but his years in academia have taught him that such timelines and milestones are at best merely suggestions and at worst cruel fictions. He often feels that scientific research, like his life, is a series of moments in which things move very, very fast, interspersed with long periods of mostly wandering in slow, uncertain circles, with some backwards and sideways tangents. On his more cynical days, he thinks the whole academic job cycle is a sustained, torturous descent into hell, with no beginning and no end. Nevertheless, after several years in the weird purgatory that is the faculty job search, he eventually gets a coveted position as an Associate Professor in the Department of Physics at Oxford. He's just turned thirty-nine, and he feels like he's finally made it. Professionally at least. 

Crowley thinks that Oxford is one of the rare places on earth (Paris is another) that seem to exist at the boundary of the real and the unreal. Here more than anywhere, he feels like he is in a novel or an alternate reality, one with literal dreaming spires and extradimensional portals, all cast over with a hazy, filtered light. It's the type of place that has a library that looks like a palace and that contains not one, not two, but _four_, thirteenth century copies of the Magna Carta, a Gutenberg bible, and Shakespeare's First Folio. It's the type of place where one could drive one's perfectly restored vintage Bentley right up onto the cobblestones in front of said centuries-old library, and park it next to two other classic cars. It's the type of place where state-of-the-art modern laboratories are housed inside stone buildings from the 15th century, gargoyles and all. Oxford is a place of nearly a millennia's worth of strange yet harmonious dichotomies, and Crowley feels immediately at home. 

He rents a flat in one of the few modern buildings, which everyone loves to hate, near the university. (This too is a dichotomy of course, but an unromantic one, and everyone has their limits; he has to admit that the concrete and metal exterior of the building is objectively ugly.) It's full of right angles and sleek, white lines, and is trendy in a particularly soulless way. He kind of hates it too, except that it's about as different from a tiny garret room in Paris as he can get. He fills it with his plants, which grow verdant and lush (he does have to admit that all that glass means the place gets nice light) and make the place feel at least tolerable, if not warm.

Crowley has officially been on the faculty here since last September, but since he's been busy setting up his lab, applying for funding, and looking for postdoctoral fellows, all while trying to complete his last two papers, and isn't slated to teach a course or advise any students until Michaelmas term, he's been pretty much sequestered in his lab for the last few months. As a result, he hasn't had much chance to explore his new surroundings or meet any faculty outside of his department. 

It's February, dreary and drizzly and grey outside. He's at a university-wide faculty meeting, the kind that is mandatory but a complete waste of time, where administrators drone on about things like enrollment and community initiatives and fundraising. It's the kind of thing that drives the faculty to flock in droves to the nearby pubs afterwards (of course they still always self-segregate by department – interdepartmental harmony, much less collaboration, is a myth that university administrators like to perpetuate but which is about as common as unicorns). He's nearly asleep by the time the meeting concludes shortly after five and blearily blinks his eyes as he exits the building into the early-dark winter evening. He's looking down, scrolling through emails on his phone, when he walks into someone. The person he's bumped into is carrying a satchel-style briefcase, an old-fashioned, somewhat worn, brown leather one, and he drops it. Crowley picks it up and hands it to the man, looks up to apologize, and is struck speechless. They both freeze in the act of handing over the bag, their two hands barely touching over the handle. 

"Anthony," Aziraphale says wonderingly, his eyes wide, and then flees.

Crowley is too stunned to notice where Aziraphale has gone; he has to blink hard before the rest of the world comes back into focus. In those few moments, his senses had all narrowed to encompass only Aziraphale. _Aziraphale._ The street in front of him is too bright and busy with the post-work crowd of people rushing to avoid the rain and get home. He himself walks home in a daze, only barely noticing that the persistent drizzle has turned into full-on rain. Of course he does not have an umbrella. He's soaked through by the time he enters his flat, but nevertheless immediately takes out his laptop and pulls up the university directory. And there Aziraphale is, looking out at him from the website of the Faculty of English. His photo shows him standing in a library, wearing a tartan bow tie and a small, sweet smile, holding a large leather-bound book open in one hand. It reminds Crowley, with a pang, of their first meeting, in the bookshop in Paris. Dr. A. Z. Fell, the caption reads, Professor of English Literature. The name Fell rings a distant bell somewhere in Crowley's mind, but he is momentarily distracted by a drop of cold rainwater plinking onto the keyboard from the sodden mess of his hair. 

It's not until later that night, when he's finally stopped staring at Aziraphale's picture and is instead idly scrolling through the news, where he comes across yet another article about his uncle, that he remembers why Aziraphale's last name is familiar. The Fells are one of the scions of the founder of Arcangel Industries, the very same company that his uncle had very publicly rebelled against years ago. It had been a sordid business all around, with Lucifer asking uncomfortable questions and everyone's dirty laundry coming to light, and nobody on either side liked to talk about it, although the tabloids wouldn't let them forget. He's never seen any mention of Aziraphale in the news stories, but then again, he himself is almost never talked about either these days; academia, while wholly absorbing the entire existence of those engaged in it, is routinely passed over and largely ignored by the outside world. 

_Oh, _he thinks. _Oh_. He never would have guessed. Aziraphale seems nothing like what he knows of the other Arcangels, not the reclusive and imperious family matriarch or the cold and arrogant siblings, Gabriel and Michael, who are the public face of the company. He wonders for a moment if maybe he's misjudged Aziraphale, that maybe he really is the kind of person who would want nothing to do with Crowley just because their families happened to hate each other. He can't, however, reconcile that thought with his memories from Paris, or with the way Aziraphale had looked at him just hours ago, a brief and brilliant flash of wonder in his wide blue eyes, like he'd rediscovered a treasure he'd long since given up for lost.

The revelation about Aziraphale's background stuns him a bit, and complicates things to be sure, but in the end it doesn't really matter to Crowley. Some part of him even relishes the idea of this new form of quiet rebellion against his blasted family, even though he is certainly not going to inform them of it. Now that he's finally found him again, Aziraphale is all he can think about. He desperately wants to see him again. He needs to know that he didn't imagine that look in his eyes.

He tells himself he's going to be rational about this, that it's high time he gets out and meets some more of his colleagues at the university. He finds himself loitering in the afternoons on a bench on the far side of the English Faculty quad, ostensibly taking a coffee break, trying for a casual slouch and hoping for a glimpse of white gold. After several days of increasingly long and desperate coffee breaks, he finally catches Aziraphale, who is strolling out of the building in the direction of the library. 

"Aziraphale!" he shouts.

Aziraphale catches sight of him, and stops short. He has both hands on the handle of his satchel, holding it in front of him like a shield. He looks a bit jumpy, as if he wants to run, but the quad is full of students and colleagues, and it's clear he doesn't want to make a scene here at his workplace. His eyes dart around, birdlike, settling anywhere but on Crowley's face. Crowley himself can't seem to look away. Aziraphale looks a little older and stouter than he had when he was twenty-two, but otherwise remarkably similar. 

"Anthony," he says, primly and a little coldly, "How do you do?"

"I--, I'm well," he says, and finds himself babbling, "I've just started teaching here. In the astrophysics department. I've been setting up my lab, looking for students, you know. The usual. Haven't seen much of the university yet or met many people. Too busy getting everything set up –"

Aziraphale cuts him off and says, in a clipped voice, "I really must be going. It was good to see you, Anthony."

"Tea!" he blurts out, a little desperately, "Have tea with me. _Please_."

Aziraphale sighs. "Fine. Just tea. Tomorrow afternoon." He names a place, some distance away from campus, and a time, and turns and walks away.

* * *

He still remembers how Aziraphale takes his tea, even though he only saw him drink it once, in that café in Paris where they'd taken refuge from a sudden downpour. Milk and two spoonfuls of sugar. Aziraphale holds his teacup in an almost stereotypically prim manner, pinky extended; his hands are shaking a bit, Crowley sees, as he sets the cup down on the saucer with a little clink. Crowley's are too, for that matter, but he's hidden them in his lap under the table.

They’re in a little tea shop, at a cozy table tucked into a hidden corner under some stairs. It's a little cramped, and the configuration of the table means they have to sit next to each other instead of across the table like normal. They're both a little stiff, a little awkward, a little uncomfortable. For Crowley, this means he is slouching in his chair in a sort of calculated way (whereas normally he just kind of lets his spine and hips settle unawares where they will). Aziraphale is sitting up very straight, his hands folded primly in front of him, fingers steepled. Crowley, with a flash of odd insight, thinks that this too is a calculated act, a nervous and too-aware exaggeration of normal behavior. There are hints of dark circles under his eyes, and a tiny pinched furrow between his eyebrows that Crowley longs to smooth away. Crowley is glad for his ubiquitous sunglasses at the moment; they effectively hide his own dark circles as well as his still too-expressive eyes. He hasn't been sleeping well, not since the faculty meeting, his heart and mind stuttering back and forth between joy and apprehension. 

Aziraphale has taken off his jacket, and he sees something small and glinting on the left side of his waistcoat.

"You're still wearing it," he says, surprised.

"What?"

"The owl pin. You're still wearing it." He is suddenly very aware of his own snake pin, on the lapel of his blazer where it's been for the last seventeen years. 

"Always," murmurs Aziraphale, a distant look in his eyes, "Right over my heart. Anthony-"

"Actually, it's Crowley," he admits, although he really doesn't mind at all if Aziraphale calls him Anthony. Nobody else calls him that, and the memory of Aziraphale gasping that name over and over again like a litany that night in Paris has made it sweet.

"I know," whispers Aziraphale, "I've known for seventeen years."

"What?" asks Crowley dumbly.

Aziraphale stares down at his hands, which are now methodically folding his napkin into ever-tinier triangles, and says, very quickly, without looking at Crowley, "That morning, in Paris. I woke up early, before sunrise. I don't sleep much really. You were still asleep. I saw your wallet, on the floor. It had fallen open, and your ID card was on top. Anthony J. Crowley. It's why I left. I didn't think, I just panicked. If my family had found out… if they knew… I'd have been cut off. I was going to graduate school for _literature_, for god's sake. They were already angry at me for not reading law or business. Everyone knows there's no money to be had in the humanities. Students in the sciences at least get a stipend." 

"You could at least have left a note! We could have tried to make it work. I don't talk to my family. I don't care what they think. I mean it. I never have."

"I-, I thought it would be better this way. A clean break. Everything had happened so fast," he mumbles wretchedly, his voice wavering, "It was all going too fast, and it scared me. It was all just too fast for me."

"Or maybe it was all going _exactly as fast as it should have_." He's angry now, doesn't really know why. He doesn't _want_ to be angry at Aziraphale. It's just that everything hurts, and he's suddenly lying alone in that bed again, staring at the ceiling and wondering what had just happened. His choices are to be angry, or to burst into tears. "That day - it was all perfect. You _broke my fucking heart_!"

"Anthony--, Crowley--, I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry. I-, I-… It's just that I've never felt like that before. You don't know how much it scared me. It was like jumping head first into a whirlpool. You don't know if you're going to hit the bottom, or get spit out, or just keep going around and around forever. And then I found out who you were, and I thought you must have had some kind of ulterior motive."

"I don't! I didn't! I swear to you, I didn't. I never asked to be a part of my family."

"And I never asked to be born into mine. But I was, and we can't escape that."

"Oh, Aziraphale…" he says, sadly.

"I'm sorry, Anthony. I'm so, so, sorry," he repeats.

Aziraphale finally looks up at him. There are definitely tears in his eyes. Crowley's anger dissipates. He wants to brush those tears away with his thumb. He wants to gather Aziraphale into his arms and tell him that everything will be all right. He wants to touch him again, to be touched. He does not do any of those things. Instead, he sighs, drops his head onto his arms on the table for a moment, looks up, and says, quietly, "I forgive you. Friends?"

He holds out a hand, and Aziraphale shakes it. His hand is as soft and warm as he remembers, and it is an effort to let go in a reasonable amount of time. Aziraphale takes the teapot and carefully pours Crowley a cup of tea. He sits back and picks up his own teacup, stirs the tea in it once clockwise.

"Well then," he says, civilly, formally, "Let's begin at the beginning, shall we? It's nice to meet you, Anthony J. Crowley. What does the J stand for?"


	4. Tell me your secrets and ask me your questions

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Best friends talk about everything but their feelings, apparently.

And so it goes, the building of a friendship; it is tentative and a bit awkward at first but nevertheless Crowley and Aziraphale find themselves unable to stay away from each other. It's still there, that instant connection they felt in Paris, that ability to talk about anything and everything. And it's still there, that constant and almost painful desire to reach out and grab Aziraphale's hand and never let go, that hint of something more between them. But all of the ghosts of Paris, the sweet and the agonizing, are also still there. Crowley can't forget the feeling of Aziraphale's lips on his collarbone, but so too he can't forget how cold the bed was when he awoke alone. He finds himself constantly afraid that Aziraphale is going to leave again. He hates watching him get out of the Bentley when he drops him off, hates seeing him get up and walk out of Crowley's office after stopping by for tea, hates seeing him turn and walk away when they say goodbye after dinner. It's why he never invites Aziraphale back to his flat, because he thinks he can't survive watching him walk out of his door. They're friends now, but he knows he doesn't have the right to say, _please stay, please don't leave me again. I know you, I love you, I want you._

He thinks Aziraphale is holding back a bit, too. Sometimes he'll catch him sitting up a little straighter, primly folding his hands in front of himself, as if he's forcing them not to reach out and do something he'll regret. Sometimes he'll press his lips together disapprovingly and say, "_really_, Crowley," in a particularly pinched tone of voice, as if to prevent his mouth from saying what it really wants to say. These days, he calls him "Crowley," like everyone else, but on rare occasions, usually after a glass or two of wine or an hour spent wholly absorbed in a fascinating book, will slip up and call him "Anthony." It always sounds a little hazy, wistful, sweet. Crowley finds it ironic and possibly a little pathetic that apparently the _sound of his own goddamn name _turns his heart into a fluttering and useless thing. (He also calls Crowley "my dear" regularly, but since Aziraphale is the type of person to use that same endearment to address small children, cute dogs, the server at his favorite sushi restaurant, and the friendly cashier at Blackwell's bookshop, he tries not to read too much into it.)

All that spring and summer, they seek each other's company nearly daily. This is Oxford, where long-bearded mathematics grad students in Jesus sandals rub elbows with tweedy professors in academic gowns and fey, ethereal students reading philosophy and tattooed punks who are computer geniuses and every other type of peculiar academic one could imagine, so they don't look as out of place together, the stylish, sharp-edged redheaded physicist and the soft, beatific, old-fashioned English professor, as one might imagine. In fact, they're just two more eccentric Oxford lecturers going about their days. Nobody remarks on their sudden closeness, as they go from apparent strangers to inseparable friends in a matter of days; he does catch random passerby looking at them with indulgent, knowing smiles sometimes, and fancies it's because the pair of them are mismatched in a striking way. 

Aziraphale drops by his office on slow afternoons, and they drink tea and chat for hours - the break room in Crowley's lab suddenly acquires a much nicer selection of tea and a number of implements for the proper brewing of tea, much to the confusion of his American post-doc, who eventually becomes quite the tea connoisseur himself. When Crowley's paper gets accepted by _Physical Review Letters_, Aziraphale takes him to high tea at the Old Parsonage Hotel to celebrate. Crowley watches Aziraphale savoring the delicate pastries and savory finger sandwiches, and can't help smiling fondly. He can almost imagine they are on a real date, not just two colleagues (or, at most, friends) out celebrating a professional achievement.

They wander down through Port Meadow to the banks of the Isis, where Crowley slouches and Aziraphale sits properly on a bench in the hazy sunlight, and they feed the fat, complacent ducks and watch punters go lazily by. Aziraphale does magic tricks for Crowley with an earnest theatricality. He's terrible, and Crowley is unaccountably charmed. Even though neither of them is what one would call a pub person, they make an exception for The Eagle and Child; if it was good enough for Tolkien and Lewis, it is good enough for them. They linger in stone-walled courtyards and listen to the choral music drifting out from open chapel doors; as a rule, Crowley does not set foot in churches, but even he has to admit the music is lovely. They wander across the perfectly manicured lawns (in part just because they _can_, now that they're finally professors) and cobbled lanes of the university, and sometimes they just sit and watch the people (who are wonderfully varied but at the same time an extremely narrow and specific subset of humanity) of Oxford go by. Aziraphale is strangely perceptive when it comes to picking out couples that he says are in love (Crowley privately thinks they might just be in lust but whatever), even if they are doing something mundane like reading the paper or eating lunch with a group of friends, and he's usually right, if gentle touches or sweet kisses are anything to go by. It's not a particularly useful hidden talent, he says, laughing, unless he wants to give up English literature for matchmaking. 

They've both acquired nearly two decades worth of the sharp and sometimes bitter cynicism that comes from spending so much time alone in libraries and laboratories, but when they're together it manifests as cutting observations and witty commentary rather than resentment. It's all a matter of perspective, and it turns out that truly being in like company does wonders for the bitter, academic soul. Crowley lives to make Aziraphale laugh, the same laugh from Paris years ago, full-throated and joyous, his eyes crinkling up at the corners and his shoulders vibrating with mirth.

In the springtime, he takes Aziraphale to the Oxford Botanic Garden, which was practically the first place he visited on campus that wasn't his office or lab and still his favorite. They wander through the glasshouses, and Aziraphale tuts a little disapprovingly but does not stop Crowley from nicking a cutting of a particularly interesting _epiphyllum _for his plant collection at home. Crowley's attempts to be surreptitious lead Aziraphale to make an offhand comment that if they were British counterintelligence officers during World War Two, the glasshouses would make a perfect place for clandestine meetings with double-crossing spies. Jokingly they dub the Rainforest House, with its impenetrable canopy of foliage and constant background noise of splashing water, the _third alternative rendezvous_. It's one of many very eclectic private jokes they share.

Aziraphale surprises him by quoting Philip Pullman when they pass by a certain wooden bench at the back of the garden: "_We have to build the Republic of Heaven where we are, because for us there is no elsewhere_." 

"Angel, I thought you never read anything that isn't at least fifty years old," he replies, gasping theatrically in pretend shock. It's a moment before he realizes that he's called Aziraphale the old endearment he's been calling him in his head for seventeen years. _Angel. My angel. _Aziraphale doesn't say anything about it though, and he even thinks he catches the corner of his mouth turning up just a little bit before he continues the conversation. Crowley, his heart rate returning to normal, reasons that if Aziraphale can call him _my dear _then he can call him _angel. _

Crowley travels to Chile, having waited for nearly a year to get observation time at the Very Large Telescope, to look at Alpha Centauri. He misses Aziraphale the whole time, both in the abstract, achy way that he's missed him for all the years since Paris, and in a new way, feeling bereft in the absence of their daily small, sweet, mundane interactions. The vastness of the ocean and the continent between them feels like the light-years of empty space between the stars. He wants to call Aziraphale just to hear his voice, but does not think he has earned the right to. (And what would he say anyway? _Angel, I miss you. Angel, I love you. Angel, I want to come home to you._) When he returns, he tells him about the work he's doing on the origins and evolution of binary stars. Aziraphale listens with a kind of rapt attention that he never receives from his colleagues, who are all too focused on the precise, small, mathematical details and tend to miss the overall wonder of it all. 

They talk about the things that by unspoken accord were never mentioned in Paris: their real lives, their work, and, tentatively, their fucked-up families, the kind of things you tell your very close friends, the ones you've known for years and gone through major milestones with. Crowley and Aziraphale have really known each other (the sixteen-year separation notwithstanding) for only a few months at this point, but every day since they've found each other again feels like a new milestone, a new day in a new world. 

Crowley tells Aziraphale about how he was abandoned by his birth mother on Lucifer Morningstar's doorstep as a child, with a note saying he was the son of Lucifer's late brother, and how he was raised in the Morningstar manor, grudgingly, along with Lucifer's other nephew Hastur under the watchful eye of a nanny. They grew up along with the nanny's daughter, a girl named Bee, who was tiny and vicious and at least a little insane. She was (and still is) prone to doing things like digging up wasp's nests and somehow ending up being the only one who doesn't get stung. When Bee turned eighteen, Lucifer officially adopted her as his daughter and heir apparent. It's rumored that she blackmailed him into doing so, and Crowley thinks the rumor is probably true, but then again, that's exactly the sort of thing that Lucifer appreciates.

He tells Aziraphale about how he would sneak out at night, while everyone was sleeping, to sit on the roof, gaze at the stars, and wish he could fly away on great, dark wings to live among them. He does not tell Aziraphale that, while he still loves to look at the stars, he no longer wants to escape into the vastness of space. In Paris, and now again in Oxford, he's found a reason to remain gloriously earthbound.

Aziraphale tells Crowley about his own family, how he'd grown up sheltered and pampered and religious, how he'd gone to church with his beloved grandmother and his cousins every Sunday when he was a child. He also tells him about how his grandmother has become something of a recluse, and hasn't spoken to anyone in the family for years; any attempt to contact her only results in messages relayed from her longtime lawyer, Nigel Metatron. Crowley can hear the sadness in his voice when he tells him this. His cousins, who are effectively the heads of the family now, have never understood why he loves books and academia and small pleasures so much. This used to sadden him as a lonely child, but now he is mostly relieved that for the most part they seem to be content to ignore him so long as he doesn't attract any negative attention that might tarnish their carefully constructed reputations. What goes unsaid, but that Crowley can read between the lines, is that he still feels the weight of expectations and obligations.

Crowley takes to joining Aziraphale at a long wooden table in a room on the upper floor of the library. He works on grant applications and manuscripts, or scrutinizes data on his extremely modern and shiny laptop, while Aziraphale peruses extremely old and dusty texts, occasionally jotting down notes with a fountain pen in his beautiful handwriting. Often, he catches himself staring at Aziraphale's cotton-gloved hands as he carefully turns a page, or at his lower lip caught between his teeth as he's lost in thought, or at his hair, turned into a halo of spun gold by the late afternoon sunlight, hazy and filtered through dusty windows. Once or twice he thinks he sees Aziraphale gazing back from behind his wire-rimmed reading glasses before his eyes flicker back down to the pages on the table. Sometimes he succeeds in tempting Aziraphale away from his books for lunch, and sometimes they work companionably side by side for hours until they realize suddenly that it's gotten dark outside.

It's after one of these days at the library that Aziraphale invites him back to his place. He lives in a small, cozy Victorian-era flat in Jericho, whose entrance is on the side of the building down a narrow, stone-walled alley covered in moss. It's a very stereotypically Oxonian flat, with tall, stuffed wooden bookcases everywhere and eclectic artwork that Aziraphale has collected over the years. It smells like Earl Grey tea and old books, which makes Crowley feel immediately at home. He has furniture that's admittedly too large for the tiny rooms but is cozy and inviting, including a bed piled high with pillows and blankets that Crowley sees when he walks through Aziraphale's bedroom on his way to the bathroom. His reckless, impulsive imagination immediately prompts him to wonder what it would be like to lie face-down in that bed and bury his face in Aziraphale's pillow to see if it smells like him. The rational side of his brain realizes that this is both probably a creepy thought to have about your best friend and a lovely, sentimental one to have about the person you are in love with.

There is a tiny walled garden in back, which is quite frankly disastrously overgrown, but it has lovely ivy-draped stone walls and a beautiful, spreading old oak tree shading one corner. Aziraphale says he had grand plans when he first moved in to plant flowers and herbs, but that he'd gotten distracted and never gotten around to it. Crowley's fingers itch to clean up this garden, to turn over the soil, to fill it with lush blossoms and verdant foliage. He envisions jasmine-perfumed summer evenings with Aziraphale in this garden, drinking wine under the stars while nightingales sing, waltzing languidly across the tiny terrace, sweet kisses at twilight, heated embraces by moonlight. He has to take a moment to compose himself and breathe deeply before heading back inside.

They sit on Aziraphale's frankly hideous (but admittedly extremely comfortable) tartan sofa, eat takeout curry, share a bottle of very good red wine, and talk. Aziraphale is writing a treatise on the Bodleian's collection of rare, misprint Bibles, and how their influence can be seen in secular works of the 19thand 20thcenturies. 

"Do you know," he muses, "I've been reading the so-called _Nice and Accurate Bible _from 1655, of which there's only one known extant copy. It says that the angel at the gates of Eden, the one with the flaming sword, was named Aziraphale, and that he met the Serpent of Eden at the beginning of it all. And they've been circling each other ever since - adversaries by design, two sides of the same coin in spirit."

"Like binary stars," says Crowley, "their orbits constantly overlapping, drawn in by each other's gravities."

"For six thousand years, since the earth was made."

Crowley fingers his snake pin, and feels warm; he says, faking indignation, "Oh, c'mon, angel, you can't tell me you believe the earth is only 6,000 years old? I can show you proof that the earth has been around for four and a half billion years!"

Aziraphale responds, mock-seriously, playing up the plummy tones in his accent, "I am _well-versed _in allegory, my dear boy. I am, after all, a _Professor _of _English Literature _at _Oxford_," and then he cracks and throws his head back and laughs out loud. His unguarded laugh is like sunlight. His bow tie is hanging loosely, undone, under the collar of his shirt, the top two buttons of which are open. Crowley knows he is staring at the white column of his throat, and he can't stop himself. At least he's not yet given in to the urge to undo more of those buttons.

Then Aziraphale's voice softens, and he continues, "but you must admit, my dear, that there are some things that science simply cannot explain, some things that are ineffable."

"Like the beauty of the universe spinning into being from a single fixed point," is what Crowley says out loud.

_Like love, _is what he thinks but does not say, _Like how I feel about you. _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The telescope in Chile really is called the Very Large Telescope, and they really are studying Alpha Centauri there. 
> 
> Chapter title is from ["The Scientist,"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1OU39Z1gs4) by Aimee Mann. 
> 
> I also have a [playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0aDRhgtUZUHx4kgVZ6ZDZ5?si=KhW8r5XfRxiCuxcF9FC8sQ) for the entire fic.


	5. Interlude: Stranger than fiction

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> On the history between the Morningstars and the Arcangels, and a new scandal that might just come to a head very soon.

The story of Crowley's family (of circumstance, certainly not of choice) can basically be distilled into a series of outrageous scandals. One could argue that what one reads on the Internet is only one, public and shocking, side of the story, but Crowley knows that the other, private, side of the story is, if not as obviously lurid, just as distasteful, even if he himself has never been privy to most of their secrets. 

Lucifer Morningstar first became famous (or infamous) nearly forty years ago, when he was only twenty-five, for engineering a massive corporate shakeup at Arcangel Industries, where he was a rapidly rising star and favorite of the founder. Given that Arcangel, nominally a consulting firm, is actually in the business of corporate espionage, it had no shortage of dirty secrets, unsavory practices, and shady transactions, many (but almost certainly not all) of which came to light during this period. Lucifer's personal assertion (which has at this point, forty years later, acquired the hazy tone of mythology or ancient history) is that he did nothing except ask difficult questions, exposing corporate and personal misconduct; the Arcangels have always claimed that blackmail and bribery and possibly even worse things were involved. The result was either an ousting or a defection, depending on who you asked, but regardless of the label, nearly a third of Arcangel's analysts and senior management decamped (or were forced to leave) to join the newly formed Morningstar Corporation, which promptly began stealing Arcangel's clients and contracts.

The founder of Arcangel, Aziraphale's grandmother, Frances Arcangel, who had always been rather hands-off as the company head, became rapidly more and more reclusive after this very public and very acrimonious split. Over the years, she has entirely stopped making public appearances or involving herself at all in the running of the company, and has retreated to her sprawling, remote manor house in the Scottish Highlands. The few employees at the estate have proven to be unfailingly, faithfully, loyal and have never been swayed by the promises of bribes or favors (from not only enterprising reporters and Morningstar associates, but also the less scrupulous members of her own family). The only person she seems to be in direct contact with nowadays is her personal lawyer, Nigel Metatron, who occasionally relays fairly impersonal-sounding messages and requests. Even getting in touch with Metatron himself in hopes that he'll convey a message is not easy these days – one has to run a baroque gamut of secretaries, personal assistants, and junior associates before getting a meeting with the man himself, and that's even assuming he's in London at all and not out on his private Aegean island (being Frances' Arcangel's personal lawyer apparently pays very well) or somewhere else that conveniently has extremely limited Internet and phone access. Internet gossip forums being what they are, there are always one or two pervasive rumors about the nature of their relationship floating around, particularly since she is still extremely wealthy, the big corporate shakeup notwithstanding. Nothing, however, has ever been confirmed or denied. She hasn't spoken or written to Aziraphale for the last twenty years, which Crowley knows saddens his friend greatly. In her absence, the running of Arcangel Industries has fallen primarily to Aziraphale's cousins, Gabriel and Michael Arcangel, who are both rigidly mannered, infuriatingly perfect, and inflexibly loyal to both their family and the company, along with a small inner circle of confidantes, most of whom are related to the Arcangels in one way or another.

Not long after the Arcangel-Morningstar split occurred, Lucifer’s twin brother, who was generally thought to have been a moderating influence, was found dead in his new corner office at Morningstar, apparently by his own hand. This event has been a perpetual favorite of true crime aficionados ever since, not so much because the circumstances were terribly sketchy but more just because everything having to do with the Morningstars invites drama and speculation. The most recent theory, promoted by a popular true crime podcast, is that a senior analyst (and distant cousin by marriage) at Arcangel named Oswald Sandalphon, who was suddenly promoted around the same time and is now part of the upper echelon, knows a lot more about the suicide than he is letting on.

This, of course, is where Crowley himself enters the story – supposedly the illegitimate son of Lucifer's dead brother, he was raised with the Morningstar cousins but never given their name, never quite treated the same. This is something which used to rankle him as a child; he was routinely taunted by Bee, who despite not being born a Morningstar has reaped all the benefits, up to and including being adopted by Lucifer and given the name that he was not allowed to use. Now, however, he is immeasurably grateful to be a Crowley and not a Morningstar. Since he's settled into a life in academia and eschewed the glitzy high society circles that his family moves in, he has apparently become too boring for the tabloids to take much notice of him (another thing for which he is grateful). As a result, the thirty-five-year old circumstances of his parentage have mostly been relegated to a colorful footnote in the numerous stories about the continued misbehavior of the more interesting members of his family.

For the past several years, the Morningstar family has once again become embroiled in a stranger-than-fiction tale involving another illegitimate child and another supposed affair. It's the kind of evergreen scandal that generates multiple Daily Mail articles of the sort that you feel compelled to click on even though you know you'll probably end up with three more computer viruses each time you click. It has dragged on for years, going through the courts several times and getting progressively more bizarre. Lucifer, who has never been married and has no biological children, has claimed that the only son of the American Ambassador to the UK, a boy with the unfortunate name of Warlock Dowling, is actually his. Even more oddly, he's also claimed that he did not have an affair with the Ambassador's wife, Harriet Dowling, an assertion which is corroborated by her, even though the husband clearly does not believe this. (The Dowlings do not get a divorce or even a separation. The current theory being advanced on the Internet is that Harriet has some kind of dirt on Thaddeus involving arms dealers in the Middle East.) They've been fighting over this in court for years, with multiple injunctions for and against paternity testing. There is a particularly weird incident on Warlock's eleventh birthday in which Lucifer shows up at his house with a huge slavering beast of a dog, who is apparently a birthday gift for the boy. He is unaware that Warlock is deathly afraid of dogs, especially ones who are bigger than he is. This incursion ends when Lucifer is chased off the grounds of the Ambassador's residence by a strangely fierce nanny wielding a pointy umbrella and a sturdy, buck-toothed gardener wielding a rake, and results in a restraining order being issued against him. (The dog is adopted by a tiny, five-foot-tall blonde lady in Cambridgeshire who names him Plato; it turns out that, despite his inauspicious introduction, Plato is an absolute sweetheart, if a bit excessively drooly, and he becomes a minor Instagram celebrity.)

Recently, the story has gotten even more salacious; even Carmine Zuigiber, who is usually exclusively a war correspondent, has picked up the story. Everyone from _Witchfinder _(the preeminent conspiracy forum on the web) to _The Madame Tracy Report _(celebrity gossip with a sideline in unexplained occult phenomena) has been covering it left and right. A couple of years ago, a woman named Mary Loquacious had popped up and started giving interviews claiming that, while she was a nun of all things, she was involved in a complicated baby switching scheme at the convent hospital involving not just the American Ambassador's son but one, or possibly even two, other baby boys. She produces a hand-drawn diagram with the babies labeled A, B, and C that reads like an instruction manual for Three Card Monte; apparently all the official paperwork was destroyed in some kind of explosion at the nunnery the day after the supposed baby switch. It's extremely unclear what the point of this whole infant exchange exercise even was and nobody can find any convincing evidence that the "Chattering Order of St. Beryl" even ever existed, but it doesn't matter: the public _loves _this kind of thing, especially when the source is a former nun. Said former nun is rather talkative, and prone to mentioning things like "hoofie-woofies" so these interviews have to be severely edited after the fact; who could really blame the networks and tabloids if they spliced together some of the juicier bits in provocative ways? In any case, regardless of Mary Loquacious' veracity, this news has prompted the Morningstars to demand maternity testing in addition to paternity testing. As ordinarily there is no need to determine maternity (the whole process of being pregnant and giving birth pretty much being a dead giveaway), the legal system doesn't really know what to do with this request, so it takes even more time in the courts. Eventually, however, the testing does happen. It turns out that Warlock Dowling is not, in fact, Lucifer Morningstar's son, but he is _also _not the son of either the Ambassador _or _his wife. Nobody knows whose kid Warlock is, nor can anybody find the Dowlings' actual biological son, although some internet forums (genealogy buffs; conspiracy nuts; hardcore British nationalists) are rife with theories, including one that the newest freshman quarterback at Alabama State, whom everyone calls Greasy Johnson for some reason, and who is, against all odds, British, is in fact the Ambassador's real son.

A whole host of private detectives and former international military intelligence personnel and high-priced lawyers get involved. It helps that the Morningstar Corporation is literally in the business of high-tech snooping into other people's business. Normal people, even American Ambassadors, do not have this kind of power. All of this not-inconsiderable manpower is nevertheless remarkably ineffective, until a tweet with absolutely atrocious spelling from some nutjob with the handle AgnesNutter leads them to another child, an intelligent but otherwise unremarkable boy named Adam Young from a country hamlet called Tadfield, who turns out to actually be Lucifer Morningstar's biological son. By this point Adam is eighteen years old, and is going to be matriculating at Oxford this fall. The press has not gotten wind of this newest development yet, nor does Adam himself know. 

Crowley is only made aware of Adam's existence when he finds an email from his cousin Bee in his inbox one morning at the beginning of September, curtly acquainting him with the salient details and informing him that she will be in Oxford the following week to look into things. Like all missives from Bee, it's vaguely threatening in an indeterminate and open-ended way. The implication is, of course, that if he knows what's good for him, he had better not cause any trouble for her or try to thwart whatever diabolical plan she's concocted to deal with the Adam thing. She will be accompanied by Crowley's other cousin Hastur, and Hastur's constant companion Ligur, who has hated Crowley ever since an unfortunate college prank involving a bucket of grape juice had gotten out of hand. (How was he supposed to have known that Ligur was _allergic to grape juice_? Crowley remembers wondering who the hell is allergic to grapes anyway and being pettily pleased that Ligur apparently wasn't able to drink wine without breaking out into hives.) He groans inwardly; that week is also the first week of Michaelmas term. Now in addition to the new students he has to advise and the introductory course he has to start teaching, he will have to deal with Bee, Hastur, and Ligur, all three of whom he's carefully managed to avoid for the last seventeen years.

When he complains about this to Aziraphale over tea that afternoon, Aziraphale mentions, surprisingly, that he is in rather the same pickle. It seems that his cousin Gabriel is also planning to be in Oxford the coming week. It's not hard to put two and two together: somehow, the Arcangels, with their own considerable resources (after all, the two companies have basically spent the last forty years trying to one-up each other in the realm of corporate espionage), must have gotten wind of what's going on, and are sending their own representative to investigate. It's a little strange that it's someone as high up as Gabriel, but then again, everything having to do with the Morningstars is personal for the Arcangels. It's a matter of principle, after all: Lucifer Morningstar has taken enough from them, and maybe it's time for some payback.


	6. Flammenschwert

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which there are family reunions, confrontations, ultimatums, shrunken heads, a really good photograph, marzipan apples, and a lot of angst.

Gabriel and Bee are officially in town to represent their respective companies at a Career Fair. Their tables are directly across the aisle from each other, in a stunning faux pas familiar to anyone who has ever had a nightmare about creating a seating chart for a wedding. (In reality, the table arrangement is the demented brainchild of a bored department administrator who is addicted to celebrity gossip sites). The Career Fair (which someone has unnecessarily capitalized, like all good epithets, on the promotional material) is put on every year by Student Services to acquaint students with industries outside of academia, and routinely elicits both deep disdain and profound jealousy from the faculty. Most of said faculty would not deign to enter the auditorium and fraternize with their industry counterparts who are engaged in better paying and less academically pure occupations. They are instead commiserating with each other at the pub about how unfair it all is that the _real (academic) _scientists have to grovel before grants committees for funding while _those sell-outs _are buying three-million-quid townhouses in London with their ill-gotten corporate-funded wealth. Crowley, unfortunately, is distinctly not at the pub, since his department is one of the official university sponsors of the event, and as the most junior member he has the dubious honor of being the official representative of the Physics Department. Aziraphale, whose presence would at least have made this whole exercise somewhat more bearable, is sadly also nowhere in attendance. (When asked by Crowley last week if he was coming, he had responded, with a smug little smirk, "My dear boy, nobody expects _English majors _to have any _job prospects _anyway," and turned back to his obscure, dusty text.) 

The afternoon drags on; he meets some interesting and eager (if idealistic and terrifyingly _young_) students, including one or two who might be interested in working in his lab, but for the most part he's bored and extraneous. Nobody really goes to a Career Fair to talk to their professors; the kids are mostly here either because they want to know how they can make money or because they're hoping to pick up some free corporate-branded water bottles and tote bags. He distracts himself for a time by imagining what would happen if he glued one-pound coins (queen side up, obviously; no call to be disrespectful) to the floors that all these money/free stuff-grubbing people are wandering around on. He wishes Aziraphale were there to make cutting, snarky remarks about said money-grubbing people. He wishes Aziraphale were there, period, but that particular desire is pretty much a constant at this point in Crowley's life whenever Aziraphale is absent. 

At some point he's forced to go and make nice with his relatives, when Hastur drags him over to their table. He endures listening to Hastur and Ligur brag and try to one-up each other in front of the students with outlandish tales of the most shocking corporate secrets and C-suite indiscretions that each of them has uncovered. The sad thing is that most of the stories are probably true, although the roles of Hastur and Ligur have been greatly exaggerated. As far as he can tell, Bee does not bother to say a single word to the students, and instead spends most of her time standing with her arms crossed in front of her, glaring across the aisle at Gabriel, who glares right back at her from his position in front of the sleekly branded white and steel grey Arcangel display. He entertains himself by imagining the corridor full of glowing laser beams, Bee's angry infrared, Gabriel's icy ultraviolet, shooting from their eyes. It's quite the gauntlet. He's honestly not sure that even James Bond could survive it.

A boy comes striding through the laser-beam gauntlet, seemingly impervious. He's tall and lanky and fresh-faced, and has a mop of golden-brown curls and piercing blue eyes. He's accompanied by two other boys and a girl, with whom he is animatedly speaking; Crowley can tell at a glance that he's definitely the ringleader of this little gang. "That's him!" hisses Hastur, nudging Ligur in the ribs. He raises his voice, "Adam! Adam Young! You look like you'd fit right in at Morningstar! Come have a chat with us!"

Actually, Adam doesn’t look like he'd fit in at a corporate office at all. Unlike many of the other young men here, who are dressed to impress, with varying degrees of sartorial success, in sport coats and khaki trousers and brogues, he is completely un-self-consciously wearing a graphic tee, jeans, and scuffed trainers. He slows, and casts a quick but discerning eye over all of them: Hastur and Ligur, falling over themselves to get him to come talk to them, Bee, looking fierce and belligerent, and Crowley, trying his hardest (and failing, red hair, sunglasses, and face tattoos not being particularly subtle) to blend into the background. "Sorry, not interested," says Adam, offhandedly, "I'm not going to sell out to the man." 

He walks off without giving any of them a second glance, completely ignoring Gabriel, who is stridently calling out, "Young man!" to try to get his attention from across the way. Instead, Adam and his friends appear to be headed with singular focus toward the veterinary office's booth at the end of the aisle, which has been a favorite among the students all afternoon, probably because they had the foresight to bring cute puppies along with their "so you want to be a vet" informational brochures. Crowley is impressed despite himself; Adam's managed to ice out his entire family, something he himself has been trying to do with only partial success for years, in less than a minute flat. Hastur and Ligur are both dumbstruck, their mouths hanging slightly open; Adam is the first person today to have completely blown them off, without so much as pretending to be interesting in their showboating. Bee is still shooting death glares at Gabriel, as if she blames him personally for Adam's snub. 

* * *

Bee finds Crowley the following morning in the central court of the Pitt-Rivers Museum. He's pretty sure she's been following him, waiting for an opportune moment to catch him alone, and figures he should just get this encounter over with so he can get on with the more important things in his life, like meeting up with Aziraphale to discuss the events of the day before. In fact, he is at the museum because they've planned to rendezvous here, but deliberately gets there a little early because he'd really like to avoid Bee and Aziraphale coming face to face if he can. He knows Bee has a flair for the dramatic (and honestly, he himself does too) and figures she'll find this setting, complete with shrunken heads, frog-poisoned arrows, and a general unsettling sense of colonialist wrongdoing, too tempting to resist engineering a confrontation here. The large central room is packed with cluttered glass cases full of hundreds of thousands of dusty cultural artifacts collected, looted, appropriated, or occasionally even legitimately acquired from all over the world, ranging from the outright macabre to the downright boring. It's mid-morning on a Wednesday, when most Oxford natives are either at work or class, and actually sunny out, which means most of the tourists are busy doing outdoor things like trying to sneak into private college courtyards or taking the perfect photo of the Bridge of Sighs. As a result, the museum is quite sparsely populated and rather quiet at the moment. They're standing in a dimly lit and narrow passageway between two tall glass cases displaying gory battle trophies, including the infamous shrunken heads. Bee looks, as always, like a slightly demented pocket dictator in an odd but obviously bespoke suit with loads of vaguely military-esque ribbons and sashes and medallions, and is wearing some kind of strange beaded red hat with twin domes over her spiky, fashionably unkempt hair. Her very recognizable style has been called everything from _cute and kooky _to _cutting-edge __avant-garde _to _fashion trainwreck _by various publications and online forums, although most people are too scared, for good reason, to say most of these things to her face.

"I know you've been fraternizing with one of the Arcangels," she whispers angrily, "I have surveillance pictures from the library." 

She shows him something on her phone. It's a photo of him and Aziraphale in the library reading room, heads bent together over a book. Late afternoon sunlight filters through the windows, illuminating their faces clearly and casting a hazy halo over both their heads, red and gold fuzzing together at the edges. It looks shockingly intimate, for all they're in a library reading a book. It's also objectively an excellent photograph: lighting, composition, the evocation of emotion. He would want this photo for himself, to gaze at as he fell asleep, if only it were not _on Bee's phone_.

"Bee, wait, I can explain," he starts, hurriedly, with a growing sense of dismay. He's concerned not for himself, but for Aziraphale, who is the very last person on earth who should deserve to be harassed by his insane family. 

"I do not want to hear your explanations," she says, "I am proposing a trade. You help me, and I won't spill your secret. You refuse, and you and your sweet angel will pay."

He doesn’t ask her what exactly she’ll do. Send the photos to the tabloids? Send them to the Arcangels? Send Aziraphale threatening messages? Send someone to break his kneecaps? Knowing Bee, it’s probably all of the above. She somehow knows exactly how to get to Crowley; he wouldn’t be too worried for himself (although the kneecaps would be admittedly unpleasant) but he can't stomach the thought of any of that happening to his Aziraphale.

"Bee," he says, "that's not a trade, that's blackmail." 

"Oh, tomato, to_mah_to. Yes or no?"

"You're not giving me much of a choice, are you?"

"No, I'm not," she says, grinning, "I do not want the boy to acknowledge his paternity. _I _am my father's daughter and I will not be replaced by some brat whose only claim is that Father couldn't keep it in his fucking pants!" She's truly angry now, and practically buzzing with fury. Her eyes keep moving, settling briefly on his face before darting up and around, which he finds both distracting and disconcerting. He has a sudden and very unnerving horror-movie image of being trapped in this particular museum, which is already rather creepy in broad daylight, after hours, lights out, being tracked like prey by Bee with huge, red, glowing, infrared-sensing eyes. Perhaps the shrunken heads were a bad idea; she's probably getting ideas. 

A young woman dressed in what looks like a Victorian gown, complete with lace cuffs and pointed, buckled shoes, perusing a nearby case full of artifacts related to witchcraft in the 1600s, looks up, startled, at Bee's suddenly raised voice. Luckily, she is immediately distracted by an awkward, bespectacled young man beside her, whom she yanks away in some alarm from a neighboring exhibit on the Antikythera Mechanism. 

"Fine," Crowley says, hastily, "Fine. I'll do it if you just calm down. But I really don't know what you expect me to do about it."

"You're the boy's academic adviser," Bee says, grinning, "I made sure of that."

"Of course you did," mutters Crowley. 

"Just convince him that he doesn't want to be part of the family. I don't care how you do it, as long as it doesn't get traced back to me. I can't be made to look like a fool. And for the love of Satan, don't let Gabriel fucking Arcangel get his claws in him either."

Bee doesn't wait for him to reply, having apparently said what she came to say; she turns abruptly and starts walking away. "And do _not _tell your lover!" she hisses over her shoulder right before she disappears around the corner. 

"He's not my lover!" protests Crowley weakly to thin air, trying to sound indignant, then thinks to himself, _but I wish he was. How I wish he was._

He is distracted from his internal dialogue by the sound of voices coming from the balcony gallery above, which is lined with cases full of the many and varied implements humans the world over have devised with which to kill each other. One of the voices is immediately recognizable as Aziraphale's; he's so attuned to it that he could probably pick it out from an entire choir of voices. The other is smooth, smug, and has an American accent; it's vaguely familiar, but he can't quite identify it. 

"Do you know, we used to have one of these in the family," says the American voice, conversationally.He continues, clearly reading from the placard, "_Flammenschwert, _translation: flame-bladed sword. German, sixteenth century. I wonder what happened to our family sword?"

"I'm sure whomever it was given to had much better use for it than we did. Killing wild animals, perhaps," replies Aziraphale mildly. 

"As if! A sword like that belongs in the hands of nobility," the man scoffs, "Aziraphale, you've gone _soft_." 

"Gabriel, what are you doing here?" asks Aziraphale impatiently. Ah, Gabriel Arcangel then. He should have known, what with the American accent and all (which Aziraphale maintained was a ridiculous affectation that his cousin had picked up during his time at Harvard Business School.)

"It's come to our attention that –" Gabriel's voice decreases in volume, so that Crowley cannot hear the rest of the sentence. After a moment, his voice rises again, and now he sounds irritated and vaguely threatening. "What on Earth is _wrong _with you? Grandmother would be so disappointed if she heard about this. I'm telling you, Aziraphale, you'll do as you're told if you know what's good for you." 

Crowley wishes he could grow wings so he could fly up to the balcony and punch him for speaking to Aziraphale like that.

There's no question in his mind that he is going to tell Aziraphale about his conversation with Bee, whatever she might threaten. Even setting aside his own feelings for the man, Aziraphale is his best friend, and Crowley's loyalty is to him a thousand times over his family. Besides, he's sure Bee is playing some kind of game, and he can't figure out what her gambit is. For one thing, her ultimatum seems too simple, too obvious, and he knows Bee, he grew up with her after all. She's all about the convoluted, baroque, opera-worthy plots. She doesn't _do _simple or streamlined in work or in life. And for another thing, her motivations for today's threat make no sense to him. She's essentially blackmailed him into doing something that he probably would have done anyway. With the possible exception of certain people to whom he is already related, he wouldn't condemn even his worst enemy to the torment of being a part of his family. He supposes it's not _so_far out of the realm of reason that she's suffering from some sort of late-onset imposter syndrome (something that Crowley, like every academic ever, is acutely familiar with). Or her ulterior motive could just be to sow discord, as she is wont to do from time to time. But she always has ulterior motives for her ulterior motives; the discord she sows usually results in some sort of additional material benefit to her. None of this really makes sense, and he feels quite rattled. He finds himself desperately needing to see Aziraphale; he needs Aziraphale's insight to help him untangle this mess, and he needs Aziraphale's presence to ground him, and he needs to know that Aziraphale is whole and unharmed.

The problem though, is that Aziraphale seems to be avoiding him. Crowley goes looking for him, first upstairs on the balcony and then downstairs, after he judges that enough time has passed for both Gabriel and Bee to have left the museum, but Aziraphale seems to have vanished into the warren of display cases and artifacts. He isn't answering his phone, and isn't in either his office or the library when Crowley goes by after finally giving up at the museum. He considers stopping by Aziraphale's flat in the evening, but manages to talk himself out of it, in no small part because he's already caught glimpses of both Bee, and, surprisingly, Gabriel lurking near his lab building; he does a double take at the latter because, from everything Aziraphale's told him and his own impressions of the man, Gabriel does not seem like the kind of person who does his own lurking.

There's no sign of Aziraphale on Thursday, or on Friday either. Crowley gets increasingly more antsy and anxious. On Saturday afternoon, he breaks and goes down to Jericho, telling himself that he just really wants a biryani from that specific little Indian place that happens to be down the street from Aziraphale's flat. He doesn't drive the Bentley, as it's too obvious just in case someone is following him. Instead he walks, full of nervous energy for the entire thirty minutes; he takes several detours through back alleys and twisty lanes and one through the covered market, where he stops at the sweet shop and buys a bag of the little marzipan apples that Aziraphale loves. He bangs on Aziraphale's door for several minutes, with no answer, and finally gives up, letting his forehead drop with a thud against the front door in resignation. 

"Fuck," he whispers, and then shouts, "_Aziraphale! Aziraphale, where the fuck are you_!?!?" He turns away from Aziraphale's door and flings the paper bag in his hand into the alleyway in despair; he trudges dejectedly away, tiny red marzipan apples flattening beneath his feet.

He goes home and polishes off most of a bottle of Talisker. He hasn't been drunk alone (or drunk with anyone except Aziraphale, for that matter) for months now. As it turns out, it's a pretty terrible idea. Crowley has the kind of brilliant mind that doesn't go helpfully numb or dull when he gets drunk; rather, he just stops being able to turn off or redirect it. When he's happy and drunk (read: with Aziraphale), this can be highly enjoyable, leading to fascinating conversational turns and the occasional flash of genius, but when he's depressed and drunk, it just means he can't switch off his self-destructive and spiraling thoughts. He keeps remembering that half-overheard conversation between Aziraphale and Gabriel. He worries that Gabriel or Bee have done something to Aziraphale, or that Gabriel has managed to convince him to return to the Arcangel fold. He regrets not telling Aziraphale how he really feels, and wonders whether he'll ever be able to do so now. He thinks bitterly that they should have run away together, responsibilities be damned, before either of their families showed up here in Oxford to burst their little idyllic bubble. A remote cottage in the far north of Scotland sounds nice right about now, all wind-whipped moors and crashing waves and not another soul for miles. Or back in Chile, half a world away, nothing but Alpha Centauri in the night sky and Aziraphale in his arms. Or, hell, his drunken mind supplies, Alpha Centauri itself would be nice - a bit hot, maybe, but definitely no blasted pesky family members there. When he does finally sleep, he has fretful nightmares of Aziraphale getting run through by flaming swords in libraries and museums and churches, and the whole building catching fire and burning down around him.

In the morning he wakes with a hangover the size of the sun, alone in his cruelly shiny and soulless flat, definitely no Aziraphale in his arms or anywhere nearby. He tries and fails to ignore the persistent, irrational voice in the back of his brain screaming at him that Aziraphale has abandoned him again, walked out of his life with no warning and without looking back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A [_flammenschwert_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flame-bladed_sword) is a two-handed sword with a flame-shaped, wavy blade. I don't actually know if there is one at the Pitt-Rivers Museum, but given the sheer amount of stuff there, I wouldn't be at all surprised if they have one. 
> 
> I updated the chapter count - I'm pretty sure at this point that this will end up being nine chapters plus an epilogue.


	7. Under pressure

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which many meetings and conversations are had, the air is cleared at last, and Adam eats an apple.

Crowley's Monday is shaping up to be a flaming disaster. The combination of his recently acquired inability to sleep without nightmares and his constant anxiety about Aziraphale, Adam, and his family means that he's only minimally functional even after several very strong espressos (which were in retrospect probably not a good idea since he is also now excessively jittery). He feels like he's swallowed a lead balloon that's now thumping its way heavily around his stomach. Instead of doing anything remotely resembling work, he's been pacing around his small office, snarling at the houseplants, radiating nervous irritation, and generally doing a very good impression of a crazy person. One of his newer graduate students had timidly peeked into his office earlier, hoping to have a word about some perplexing results, and caught him emphatically berating a fiddle leaf fig. (This so-called "fig intimidation incident" will become a sort of myth told to all new members of the lab. The fig tree itself grows to massive proportions and is perpetually rather ridiculously lush and green; in the future, its progeny, rumored to be a good luck talisman, will grace the labs and offices of many of Crowley's former postdocs turned professors.)

He's misting the philodendron plants on his windowsill and feeling personally affronted by the yellow spots on their leaves when Hastur and Ligur show up. It takes all of his admittedly frayed willpower to refrain from aggressively spraying them in their unwelcome faces with the plant mister like two misbehaving dogs. "Cousin Crawly!" says Hastur faux-jovially, clapping him on his shoulder. Behind him, Ligur lurks in the open doorway, arms folded, and glares suspiciously at the top of the door. Crowley tries not to seethe (and mostly succeeds, only letting out a bit of a hiss) when Hastur calls him by his much-hated childhood nickname.

"Bee says you're the brat's advisor. How about you give us his schedule?"

It's early afternoon, and the lab and the halls around it are full of students and post-docs, who tend to roll in blearily around lunchtime and work into the wee hours of the night. Crowley really does not want to get in a fistfight with his cousin at his workplace, nor does he want anyone to start getting curious about who these two men who are very obviously not scientists or any other type of academics are doing skulking around his office, so he figures it's easiest to just give in. It's not like they won't be able to figure out Adam's schedule some other way anyway. Hastur seems surprised that he's willing to just hand it over without further persuasion. Ligur looks downright disappointed that he won't get to deal out said persuasion. 

"Oh, look, mate," says Hastur gleefully to Ligur, "he's got a late chemistry lab Friday night. That'll be just perfect. There'll be no one around." 

"Are you sure we shouldn't tell Bee about this?" asks Ligur, a little nervously, "She's going to be _pissed _if she finds out we went behind her back."

"Nah. She's been acting strange lately anyway. Distracted. I bet she won't even notice. Besides, ol' Lucifer will be beside himself if we deliver the boy to him. Maybe we'll finally get what we deserve, no thanks to bloody fucking Bee."

* * *

"Oh, you've _got_ to be kidding me," says Adam Young as he walks through the door later that same afternoon and sees who his academic advisor is. It's clear that he recognizes Crowley from the Career Fair and is unimpressed to say the least. "Don't tell me, I should take English Literature, Intro Physics, General Chemistry, and Nepotism 101."

"Listen, Adam… I had nothing to do with this –" he begins, not really sure what to say.

"And tell that Hastur guy to stop sending me emails. I'm not interested in all that _join our happy corporate family _bullshit."

Adam, Crowley thinks, is direct, sarcastic, and unintimidated. He can respect that, and so he decides that he's going to tell Adam everything, but not right here and now. Under his desk, he taps something on the screen of his phone, and _Under Pressure _starts blaring from the high-end stereo system at a rather high volume. He leans over his desk, making a show out of scrambling for the stereo remote, and whispers a couple of sentences in Adam's ear. Adam's eyes widen slightly, but he doesn't say anything.

He does actually have a reason, besides just eccentricity or petulance, for this strange, dramatic gesture. He knows how his family works and is admittedly maybe just a little bit paranoid. He's sure that Bee (and possibly also Hastur and Ligur) is keeping tabs on him, and he thinks there's a good chance that someone has bugged his office. It's possible that he's watched too many James Bond films, but then again, this exact kind of thing is definitely in Bee's skillset. 

He grabs the remote and jabs some random buttons, and the music shuts off after a few more seconds. "Sorry about that," he says, leaning back in his chair and affecting a casual grin, "Sometimes I swear that stereo system is possessed by a demon. Now, where were we? Discussing what courses you want to take?"

As it turns out, although Adam has chosen to read Physics at Oxford, he's interested in both science and humanities. He's charismatic, whip-smart, and insightful, and has that rare and marvelous ability to see both the big picture and the precise details. Aziraphale would like him. During the course of their half-hour discussion, which ranges from astronomy to university life to the city of Oxford and does not veer into anything having to do with his (_their) _family, they warm to each other rapidly. Adam has a particular combination of the absolute certainty of youth and a lethally sharp, inquisitive, puzzle-solving mind that kind of reminds Crowley of himself when he was that age. (Adam, however, also seems to be a _people person _in a way that Crowley definitely is not, and has never been, not even when he was young.) _Dammit_, thinks Crowley, _I actually really like this kid. _He's never expected to meet another person to whom he is related that he actually _likes_.

After Adam leaves, with his academic schedule approved and his first impressions of Crowley hopefully amended to something more complimentary, Crowley goes to the office of the department admin (who has gone home for the day) and uses her phone to call Aziraphale. He is still not answering his phone, to Crowley's continued dismay, so he leaves a message: "Angel, it's me. We need to talk. Meet me at the third alternative rendezvous. Tomorrow afternoon, after you're done with your tutorial." 

* * *

He has no idea whether either Aziraphale or Adam will show, but Crowley nevertheless goes to the Botanic Garden at a quarter past four the following afternoon, a tiny sliver of hope shivering in his chest. Aziraphale has a tutorial with one of his favorite students on Tuesday afternoons between three and four. He knows this because Aziraphale likes to talk about his students, especially the ones of whom he is particularly fond, and he likes to listen to Aziraphale talk about anything and everything. He hasn't heard Aziraphale's voice for a full five days. 

He pushes open the glasshouse door, is hit in the face by a blast of warm, humid air. _There_. A flash of pale gold among the dark greens and mahogany browns. He feels momentarily disoriented, although he doesn't know whether it's from the sudden change in temperature or from his pulse suddenly jumping up into his throat. 

Aziraphale is walking slowly, methodically, his hands clasped behind his back, beneath the canopy of large, waxy leaves and draping, tangled vines. It takes a few moments for Crowley to force his trembling legs to move, but he manages to fall into step beside him as he walks around the small pond. His body is still attuned subconsciously to walking beside Aziraphale's. Crowley's loose-limbed slithery saunter and Aziraphale's prim, straight-backed gait are somehow exactly in lockstep with one another. Aziraphale takes an audible breath and looks over at him, eyes wide, for just a moment before looking straight forward again.

_You came_, thinks Crowley, _you came. You didn't leave me. You're all right. _Crowley yearns to brush his fingers against Aziraphale's sleeve, to rub his thumb across that little worried frown between his eyebrows, to press his lips to the dark circles above his cheekbones. He craves tangible proof beneath his fingertips that Aziraphale is here, that he is real, but he doesn't dare touch him. "Angel," he says, trying for lightness and failing miserably, his voice hoarse, "where have you been?"

"Home. My flat," says Aziraphale shortly. His voice is flat, and not at all like his normally expressive tenor. He stares resolutely at the ground, biting his lower lip, worrying it between his teeth. 

Crowley has told Adam to meet him here at five, which means that they have three-quarters of an hour. Forty-five minutes in which to clear the air, or to sit in uncomfortable silence and be smothered by assumptions and silent accusations. He's beginning to wonder if this has been a terrible idea. The tension between them is palpable even over the humid air inside the glasshouse. The sound of water droplets plinking into the pond appears magnified, too loud, in slow motion. Crowley wonders, slightly hysterically, if this is what time dilation feels like, one body moving too fast, the other too slow, their gravities always out of synch. They make a slow and careful circuit around the small pond.

"You should have called," he says, "I was … worried." (_Frantic, plagued by nightmares, abandoned, lost. So, so lost without you, angel.)_

"Crowley…"

What happened, angel? Talk to me. _Please_."

"Gabriel-- Gabriel said I had gotten soft. He told me that Grandmother would be so disappointed to see that I was fraternizing with the enemy. Those were his words. _Fraternizing _with the _enemy_." The terrible emotionless flatness is leaving Aziraphale's voice, but it's been replaced by a wavering tremulousness that makes Crowley's heart ache.

"Are we enemies, angel? I don't think we've ever really been enemies, you and I."

"We grew up on different sides. We're supposed to be."

"Oh, fuck that! You _know _I don't buy that bullshit."

"He said you had to be using me. That you were keeping things from me. He showed me a picture of you with your family at the career fair."

"You _knew _I was going to be there! I told you myself. They dragged me over there, I didn't want to make a scene at work. Angel, it was terrible, _they're _terrible." 

"And I saw you in the museum. Cozying up with your cousin."

"She was trying to _blackmail _me! She was threatening _you!_ What was I supposed to do? Tell her to fuck off, so she could go and set your flat on fire or something?"

"I know you're keeping something from me. I've been noticing for months now. Sometimes you're… so careful … with your words. I can tell you're not saying everything. And you're always wearing those damn glasses. You _know _I like your eyes, you know I won't run away from them. But you still wear them, even when we're alone. Why? What are you hiding from me, Anthony?"

The use of his first name throws him, and for a moment, Crowley considers just letting it all out, blurting out, _I'm in love with you. I know we've only really known each other for six months, but I've been in love with you for at least five of those. Maybe I've been in love with you since Paris. It's only gotten worse. And every time we're together I have to hold myself back, I have to stop my hands from reaching out to touch you and my mouth from kissing you and my eyes from revealing how much I love you. _But there's still a fearful, strangled thing inside of him telling him that it would be going too fast and that he'll lose Aziraphale for good if he confesses, so he swallows the impulse, his pulse jittery inside his chest, and instead says, "I can't tell you. I can't. I'm sorry. But… But the last thing I want to do is hurt you. Aziraphale, you have to believe me. I'm not on their side. You and I, we're on our own side."

It's a weak defense, cagey and deflective, displaying the same hesitation that he's just been accused of, and he knows it, so he's surprised when Aziraphale swallows hard and nods, a look he can't quite identify flitting across his features. "I know," he says, "I figured it out. I stayed in my flat for days. I couldn't sleep. I let a lot of cups of cocoa go cold. I stared at the same page in my book for hours. I sat in the dark because I didn't see the point in turning on the lights. But I figured it out in the end. I saw you from the upstairs window. When you came to my flat on Saturday. I didn't have the courage to let you in. You knocked on my door for ages, and you screamed my name, and I thought, that's the voice of a man whose world is ending. And afterward I realized, this man is my best friend in all the world, and I trust him_. I trust you, Anthony._ I still don't know what you're keeping from me, but I trust that you won't hurt me and I trust that you'll tell me when you're ready." He's stopped walking, is looking straight at Crowley now, his eyes wide and unguarded. 

Crowley gazes back at him, over the top of his sunglasses. He's still wearing them, and all his nerves still feel jangling and frayed, but it's a start. It's a start. 

"I will," he says, "I can't tell you right now, but I promise I will someday."

They settle themselves on a bench to wait for Adam, one on either side, a small, careful distance between them. If the air's not exactly clear, it's at least no longer so choked with things left unsaid that they can't breathe. Crowley is enough of a realist to know that not everything between them is all tickety-boo, as Aziraphale would say, but he no longer feels that oppressive sense of impending doom that's been dogging him for days now, the feeling that Aziraphale is never coming back to him. There will be more to talk about, for sure, but for now they opt to discuss the relatively safe topic of Adam Young. 

Crowley has apprised Aziraphale of the current situation and they are speculating on Hastur and Ligur's plans for Friday evening (the only thing he is relatively sure of is that, whatever they're plotting, it won't be subtle) when Adam makes his appearance. He's tossing a bright red apple from hand to hand, likely plucked from the orchard of native British fruit trees elsewhere in the garden. There are signs all around the orchard promising dire consequences to those who dare pick the apples; he appreciates and admires the impulse to question and flaunt such rules. (Crowley himself would have questioned the point of such a rule and, having concluded that taking an apple, so long as one ate it, was not an unethical or malevolent act, would pick the apple without undue consternation. Aziraphale would probably have analyzed the text of the warning signs, found a clever loophole, and then savored the apple. Bee would just take the apple and then find some way to pin it on one of her enemies.) He understands, suddenly, that the fact that Adam is here, has responded to his frankly odd request for a clandestine meeting, means that he's decided Crowley is all right, and that he's chosen to thrown his lot in with them.

"Adam," he says, "I'd like you to meet someone. This is Aziraphale. My best friend."

He sees a flash of something (an exhale of relief, certainly, and something else he doesn't quite catch) cross Aziraphale's face before it's replaced with a welcoming smile for Adam.

Adam shakes Aziraphale's hand, sits down, and bites into his apple with a juicy crunch. Crowley tells Adam the whole story (inasmuch as he himself understands it, anyway) of his true parentage, and about Hastur and Ligur planning something for Friday evening after the chemistry lab. Although it's news to Adam, he takes it all with a surprising amount of equanimity; Crowley can practically see the pieces falling together in his head. They come up with a plan (or Adam does, for the most part, with Crowley and Aziraphale offering small suggestions). Crowley promises to hang around the chemistry building when the lab gets out, for moral support if nothing else. Aziraphale, who has been mostly quiet during this discussion, surprisingly says he will be there too. It's a relief to finally have some sort of concrete plan in place to deal with this thing, even if it is a vague plan based on incomplete information, and he finds the process of coming up with it surprisingly engaging. 

* * *

They wait for half an hour after Adam leaves so they won't be seen in his company. Sometime during that time, they've drifted closer together on the bench, each moving by millimeters at a time. 

"I missed you these last few days, my dear," murmurs Aziraphale, "I'm sorry I made you worry. I'm sorry I didn't come down when you came looking for me. I didn't know how to tell you how sorry I was for hurting you like that."

"Angel," he says, "You have nothing to be sorry for. I'm just glad you're all right."

Crowley looks over at him, gazes at his profile against the dark green foliage around them. Aziraphale's eyes are unfocused and distant, and he has the obviously strained look of someone who hasn't slept well for days, but nevertheless Crowley thinks that his face, with its upturned nose and gentle mouth, is the most beautiful thing he's ever seen. Neither of them says anything more for a minute or two; the silence is not quite the comfortable one they've enjoyed in the past, but neither is it fraught and oppressive.

After a while, Aziraphale starts speaking again. "I can't believe I let Gabriel get to me. I have a million reasons to trust you, and none to trust him. He's never done anything for me that wasn't really just to benefit himself. He doesn't care one bit what Grandmother thinks. He hasn't cared for a long time. I'm sure he's trying to impress _someone_, but it's definitely not Grandmother. Anyway, he wanted me to, in his words, _leverage my relationship with you _to try to find out what plans your family has regarding Adam. Ugh. I told him no, under no circumstances would I do such a thing, and then he sort of threatened me."

"I think I overheard that bit," says Crowley, feeling once again that he'd really like to punch Gabriel in his perfect face, never mind that he'd probably break his fist on his jaw. (He is, after all, a skinny scientist who spends all his time either staring at the night sky, holed up in his lab, or pining after his best friend. He probably can't take on a corporate executive with an overzealous personal trainer and an obsessive daily running habit in a fistfight. Sure, he's blazing mad, but he's willing to bet Gabriel is probably just as full of self-righteous fury.)

"I thought he might have done something to my phone, or was watching me somehow. I was trying to figure out how to see you without him finding out when you left the message about meeting here. It was terribly clever of you, I must say."

Crowley understands the paranoia, and in fact shares it. You don't grow up in the shadows of the two largest purveyors of corporate espionage services without some of it rubbing off. "I did see him," he tells Aziraphale, "lurking around my office. Bee too."

"Although," Aziraphale continues softly, glancing over at Crowley, "I was about to break. I've missed you _so much_, my dear. I didn't think I could go another day without seeing you."

Crowley doesn't really know what to say in response to this – one part of his heart, the ever-hopeful _in love with his angel _part, shivers with happiness, even as the other part, the _in unrequited love with his best friend who doesn't love him back like that _part, says bitterly that Aziraphale is probably just talking about the fact that they're best friends. Instead of responding, he changes the subject. "Why is Gabriel even here? I get that they want to keep tabs on what the Morningstars are doing, but surely he has lackeys to do that kind of legwork for him." 

"Maybe just to keep tabs on me," says Aziraphale a little bitterly. "Honestly I don't have any more idea than you do. It _is_ odd, come to think of it. He's not usually the type to dirty his hands with such things." 

"There are so many things about this whole situation that don't make any sense. It's … troubling."

"Troubling indeed," agrees Aziraphale, getting up and dusting his trousers off with both hands. "Well, it's getting late. Let's get a wiggle on, shall we?" 

"Wiggle on?" asks Crowley, amused. It's such an absurdly anachronistic and quaint turn of phrase, and _so absolutely Aziraphale _that he feels a little prickle across his eyes and has to blink hard several times. "Oh, angel, I've missed you so much." 

* * *

Crowley takes Aziraphale to Magdalen Tower, across from the Botanic Garden. He doesn't really want to let Aziraphale out of his sight just yet, but the thought of doing anything remotely social is vaguely terrifying. Aziraphale doesn't protest, and even seems pleased, saying that he's always wanted to go up to the top of the tower but has never gotten an invitation. Crowley is a Fellow at Magdalen, a fact that had made Aziraphale mildly jealous (Magdalen was Oscar Wilde's college, after all) when he'd first found out, so he actually has the much-coveted access to the tower. Technically, he's supposed to request the key from the porter each time, but he's managed with some difficulty to procure his own copy of the key. (It had been quite the adventure trying to find someone who could replicate an ancient, enormous, wrought iron key, especially one that he could only be in possession of for an hour or two at most before people got suspicious. In the end he had taken it to the eccentric man who ran the physics department machine shop – it turns out you can 3D print pretty much anything if your equipment is good enough. The gigantic key looks absurdly goofy rendered in blue plastic resin, but it does work.) He has once or twice snuck up here to look at the stars on clear, late nights, although the stairs are flat-out treacherous in the dark. For all that it's one of the most recognizable landmarks at Oxford, the tower is usually deserted, as most people are not allowed entry and most of those who do are too lazy to climb the steep staircase or go through the rigmarole of requesting the key. 

They climb the vertiginous, uneven, dimly lit spiral staircase, and emerge into the late afternoon sunlight at the top, a little out of breath. A hundred feet and more below them, the university spreads out in a profusion of grey stone rooftops, grassy lawns, and green-gold treetops; they can see the pathways and demarcations of the Botanic Gardens across the way, the gleaming, sinuous line of the river curving around and behind it. Leaning against a sixteenth-century stone parapet, with gargoyles leering above him, Aziraphale looks over at Crowley, gives him a small, hesitant smile, and says again, "I'm sorry for worrying you these past few days, my dear. Please forgive me." 

Crowley smiles back, comes to stand next to Aziraphale to look out at the rooftops and the trees, says quietly, "I forgive you,_" _and thinks, _there's nothing to forgive you for, angel. _

"I was … ten, I think, the last time Grandmother spoke to me," Aziraphale murmurs softly, as if to himself. He twists the heavy gold signet ring, with its ornate design of wings and feathers surrounding a shield and crest, around his right pinky. "She gave me this when I was a child. Back then, I had to wear it on my thumb. It's the family coat of arms. It's supposed to symbolize righteousness and familial loyalty. For a long time, that felt like love."

"And does it still?" asks Crowley, cautiously.

"I still love my grandmother, if that's what you're asking. And maybe she loves me, maybe she doesn't. I don't know. But I do know that it doesn't really matter to me any more if I have her approval, or the approval of my family. I used to think that if I just explained things rationally, laid out a logical argument, then they would have to understand. But I've realized that they're not listening at all. I don't know if they ever did. They're all so convinced that they're right, that their way is the only way. It's taken me years to understand that love means understanding and acceptance, that the people who truly love you do so without conditions. Like Shakespeare said, _Love is not love/Which alters when it alteration finds,_" Aziraphale replies, his eyes trained on the horizon.

His voice trails off. Crowley wants to ask, _have you found that kind of love? _He wants to say, _I'll always listen to you, even beyond the end of the world. _He doesn't quite have the courage to say either of those things out loud. Instead he says, "I got drunk, you know. After you didn't answer your door on Saturday, I went home and got drunk alone and it was a _terrible _idea. All I could think was, _I've lost my best friend. _I'm so glad you're back, so I won't have to drink alone for the rest of my life." Aziraphale, he thinks, is the only person in the world who might understand how much of an admission this seemingly glib statement really is for him.

They stand facing west and watch the sun set over the pale, swooping spires of Oxford. This high up, it feels as if they are alone not only up here but in the whole world. The faint sound of choral music, only the higher registers carrying up to the top of the tower, drifts up from the open door of the chapel in the courtyard below, where evening services are just concluding. As the light slowly fades and casts everything into silhouette, Aziraphale wraps an arm around Crowley's waist and pulls him close, so that their sides are pressed together from shoulder to hip. He lays his temple against Crowley's cheek, and Crowley can feel both their pulses beating in time with one another. Aziraphale's hair is very soft against Crowley's face, and he smells like lavender and lemon verbena and rosemary. Crowley relaxes, pliant and boneless, against Aziraphale's soft and solid warmth, and exhales slowly. He feels like something precious and essential has been returned to him at long last. Everything might implode in a few days, but for this one moment Crowley is warm, and content, and blissfully whole. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The title is obviously from "Under Pressure" by Queen + David Bowie. Aziraphale quotes Sonnet 116 from Shakespeare. 
> 
> This chapter was a beast to write. The limited POV was really challenging here. I actually ended up writing several pages of Aziraphale's POV of the events in the second half of the previous chapter in order to try to work some things out. I'll probably clean that up and post it as a related work/bonus scene in a day or two. Hope that makes up for the longer than usual wait for this chapter!
> 
> Edit: The [Aziraphale POV](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20570645) of the latter part of Chapter 6 is up now!


	8. Wayward children

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A confrontation.

It's practically a rule that the six-hour-long organic chemistry labs are always scheduled at the most inopportune times; accordingly, Adam's lab ends at 9 pm on Friday. The teaching labs are situated in an extremely old, U-shaped gothic stone building that is designed a bit like a cloister (and this being Oxford, it might have been an actual cloister at some point), with a long, open colonnade running along the front of the building. There are a number of archways behind the colonnade, some leading to interior doors and others providing a passageway to an open courtyard ringed by walls on three sides and a small parking lot on the fourth. 

Adam emerges shortly after nine, in the company of his three friends. They all seem a little dazed; six hours spent breathing chemical fumes while trying with varying degrees of success to purify isoamyl acetate will do that to anyone, particularly if one's lab partner is Brian, who has managed to spill some rather pungent-smelling byproduct of the reaction on himself. Adam tells his friends that he'll meet them a little later at the pub, as he has to go pick something up at his dorm first. His voice echoes clearly down to where Aziraphale and Crowley are waiting in one of the shadowed archways that lead into the courtyard. Adam's friends walk away and disappear around the side of the building, chatting and making plans for the evening, while he himself lingers for a bit in front of the building, checking his phone. The other students disperse quickly, since chemistry lab is not where anyone wants to be on a Friday night. Eventually, Adam starts heading down the colonnade, still looking down and texting someone on his phone as he walks.

Not far from where Aziraphale and Crowley are hiding, two figures in trench coats, one tall and one shorter, slink out from one of the interior doorways just as Adam is passing by. Crowley has to admit that although Hastur and Ligur might not know subtlety if it smacked them in the face, they do have some skills in lurking. Ligur grabs Adam from the back by both arms, Hastur slaps a hand over his mouth, and together they manhandle him through into the courtyard. Adam puts up a pretty good fight, if the pained grimace on Hastur's face and his exclamation of "Fuck! You little brat!" is anything to go by, but he's no match physically for tall, wiry Hastur and broad-shouldered, hefty Ligur. 

The courtyard is illuminated by moonlight and the lights from the parking lot on the far end, but deeply shadowed around the edges. There's a shuffling sound coming from the left, and a moment later, Bee steps out from a darkened gothic archway. Her hat is askew, her sash is twisted around behind her, and the look on her face is one of extreme annoyance and utter contempt.

Gabriel, of all people, follows her out of the archway. He is wearing a luxe-looking white cashmere scarf wrapped high and tight around his neck, which is strikingly incongruous given that the rest of his outfit consists of running clothes and trainers. It's also a warm early September night that definitely does not call for cashmere scarves, and he does indeed look rather flushed. His hair is also somewhat disheveled, and he's breathing a bit heavily, all of which are not unexpected in someone who has just been out for an evening run, but is nevertheless still a strange look on someone who is routinely dubbed "Mr. Perfect" by the media.

Out of the corner of his eye, Crowley sees Aziraphale's eyes widen in momentary surprise when his cousin appears, and then settle into a knowing look that seems almost… _smug_. It's his triumphant _I just got the last cream puff in the bakery case _look that Crowley finds terribly cute. _Damn, I love you, _thinks Crowley, fondly and somewhat inappropriately, given the situation.

"What the _fuck _is all this?!?!?" demands Bee, looking extremely put out. Gabriel stares at her, but doesn't move. Hastur and Ligur both let go of Adam and each take a few rapid steps backwards, putting distance between themselves and a furious Bee.

"Do you even have a single brain cell between the two of you?!?! You can't just go around kidnapping people! What do you even hope to accomplish here? Honestly, do either of you even _know _what subtlety is?"

Hastur grins at her defiantly, from a safe distance. "You're just jealous. We got him first, no thanks to _you_, Bee. You'll see."

Behind him, Ligur is busy tapping at the screen of his phone. He looks up at Hastur's words and grins back. "All set. He's on his way." 

Bee sighs. "I don't have time for you two and your idiocy right now. Do I have to do _everything _myself around here?" 

"Adam," she says, not entirely enthusiastically, "We're not all _bloody __flaming morons _like those two over there. Did they tell you why you're here?" 

Adam nods, even though Hastur and Ligur hadn’t been the ones who had told him anything.

Bee opens her mouth to start talking again, but is cut off by Gabriel, who turns the full force of his thousand-watt, Most Eligible Bachelor grin on Adam. "Young man," he says, "you've seen how this lot" – waving a hand toward Hastur and Ligur – "are. Do you really want to be associated with them? With the _Morningstars _of all people? They're all traitors and thugs. Always going to be using you to get the upper hand. _We _are not like that, we have _principles_."

Adam, Crowley notes gleefully, looks unimpressed. Bee is looking over at Gabriel with one eyebrow cocked and an odd expression on her face; she's rolling her eyes but does not seem nearly as furious as Crowley would have expected. 

Adam hasn't moved, nor has he responded to either Gabriel or Bee. He appears to be considering their statements and assessing his situation as he looks around the courtyard. 

"We should go to him," says Aziraphale softly.

"Are you sure, angel?" he whispers, "If we do this, Bee will make sure that everyone knows about us."

Aziraphale suddenly whirls around to face Crowley, closing the distance between them. He grabs Crowley by both lapels, presses him up against the cold stone wall, and whispers, "courage." It's not clear whether he's talking to himself or to Crowley. Then all thoughts leave Crowley's head, because Aziraphale is kissing him, fierce and desperate and hard, right on the mouth. His own lips open to Aziraphale's without conscious thought, like an autonomic, instinctive response. He stops being aware of time – the kiss could have been a second long, or minutes, or years. As far as second first kisses go, it's not at all like any of the situations he had pictured or imagined, but somehow, it's the perfect culmination of seventeen years of wanting, half in shadow, half in light, pressed up against a six-hundred-year-old, cold stone wall. 

"Let them," says Aziraphale, grabbing his hand, "I'm tired of hiding. I'm tired of being afraid. I want everyone to know."

The world comes back into focus with a sudden jolt of tension and adrenaline. They step out, hand in hand, and go to stand behind Adam. 

Both Gabriel and Bee's eyes widen when they appear. Gabriel takes a large step to the side, away from Bee, and says, "Aziraphale" at the same time as Bee says, "Crowley." The intonation in their voices is exactly the same, and somehow manages to convey in a single word massive annoyance and irritation that their respective black sheep cousins have turned up. Crowley wonders whether he should start keeping the tire iron from his Bentley on his person as a precaution.

Before either Bee or Gabriel can say anything else, however, they are interrupted by a low, ominous, rumbling sound in the distance that is rapidly getting louder. An enormous, gas-guzzling yellow Hummer with dark tinted windows, excessively bright high beams, and entirely too much testosterone rolls up into the parking lot a few seconds later. It comes to a stop next to a silver Mercedes sedan, which looks tiny and insignificant in comparison. Now, Crowley has seen his share of interesting vehicles in the lanes and driveways of Oxford. His own Bentley, for one. The absolutely stunning, impeccably restored, 1927 Rolls Royce Phantom he'd spotted one Saturday morning parked on the plaza outside the Sheldonian, for another. There's also a bright blue, absurd three-wheeled thing claiming to be a car with the words "Dick Turpin" inexplicably painted on it that Crowley has occasionally seen parked outside the Physics building. _This _car, however, has got to be the most out-of-place vehicle that has ever rolled down the streets of Oxford. He thinks that it probably wouldn't even be able to fit down most of the narrow, historic streets here without taking out a few building facades and a pedestrian or two. 

"Oh, _fuck_," says Bee when she catches sight of the car. She grabs a startled Gabriel's arm and ducks behind him (which is surprisingly effective since he's easily twice her size). Then she starts backing up, very quickly, into the shadowed archway behind her, dragging Gabriel along with her like a shield. Crowley hears the muffled sound of a door opening and closing a few moments later. 

Crowley recognizes the car as well, and mutters to Aziraphale, "Oh fuck," echoing Bee. "They called his father."

It's a very recognizable and very hideously ostentatious car, one that has in fact been photographed and discussed _ad nauseum _on both car sites and celebrity gossip sites for the last few years. Hummers haven't been made for almost ten years, but the owner of this particular one has had it customized and overhauled so that it is the only car like it in the world. At this point, it's some unholy chimera of Hummer and Escalade, and is exactly as horrendous as that sounds. 

From out of this beast of a car steps Lucifer Morningstar, tall, broad-shouldered, and florid, holding out his hands to Adam and exclaiming, "Son!" in a booming voice that is probably trying to be fatherly but is really just frightening. Adam looks momentarily stunned, and a flash of panic crosses his face. It's a common reaction when one is first faced with the larger-than-life force of nature that is Lucifer Morningstar. Adam looks desperately to Crowley and Aziraphale, behind him. Crowley steps forward, places his hand on Adam's left shoulder, and gives him a small, short, familial nod. On his other side, Aziraphale puts his hand on Adam's right shoulder and smiles genially at him. Together, they stand there, three wayward children making their own way in the world. 

Adam squares his shoulders, takes a deep breath, and says, "Who the _hell _do you think you are? My parents are Dierdre and Arthur Young. They raised me, loved me, took care of me when I was sick. I'll always have a place in their home. My father and I go camping every summer, just the two of us and Dog. They were there for me _every day of the last eighteen years_. Where were you?"

"I can give you money, power, anything you could ever want in the world."

"I don't need you. And you can't give me love. I've got all the world I want right here."

"I've built an empire, and it will all be yours! My son."

"You're not my father. You never were, and you never will be." There's steel in Adam's voice now, and absolute certainty. 

Lucifer is turning red and sputtering a little. "I should have known that any son of mine would be rebellious!" 

Adam doesn't bother to respond to that. Instead, he looks around the courtyard, raises his voice, and says, "Did you get all that, you three?" 

From various shadowed archways and the alleyways between buildings emerge Adam's three friends - Pepper, Wensleydale, and Brian. Each of them is triumphantly holding up a phone. "Yep," calls Pepper from where she's been hiding behind the silver Mercedes, grinning and brandishing her mobile like a weapon, "The videos are being uploaded even as we speak. They'll publish automatically tomorrow morning unless we stop it." Wensleydale and Brian each nod in agreement and salute Adam with their mobiles from either side of the quad.

"Good. Let's get out of here. I could really do with a kebab right now." Adam grins back at his friends, tossing a "thanks" over his shoulder to Aziraphale and Crowley, the perfunctory nature of his gesture belied by the genuine smile on his face.

Lucifer is speechless. He knows when he's been gotten the better of, even though it doesn't happen very often these days, and he can't do anything but let them go. He's completely lost control of this narrative, and he knows it. Bee and Gabriel seem to have vanished. Hastur and Ligur look confused, but make to step forward toward Adam; Lucifer stops them in their tracks with a livid glare. They watch as Adam walks away, joins his friends, and disappears into the lamplit street beyond, leaving only the sound of laughter that conveys the relief and thrill of an audacious plan perfectly executed. 

"I think Adam's got the right idea, Angel," says Crowley in an undertone to Aziraphale, "What do you say we get out of here?"

"Yes, let's," agrees Aziraphale, "but let's _not _go get a kebab." He shudders slightly, which is really the only reasonable response to that particular line of thought unless one is especially drunk and it is very late at night, at which point nothing but a mystery meat kebab from a dodgy van will do. 

Crowley turns his back on Lucifer Morningstar, takes Aziraphale's hand, and together they walk out of the courtyard without looking back. 


	9. The first morning (of the rest of their lives)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the morning after is better than seventeen years of dreams, secrets are revealed, and Aziraphale's hidden talent comes in handy.

They end up going to Crowley's flat, mainly because it's closer than Aziraphale's and they're both exhausted and a little bit shell-shocked. Crowley for one is also still reeling from that kiss against the wall, maybe even more so than he is from the other events of the evening, which Adam had handled perfectly well with only minimal assistance from either of them. It occurs to him only later that this is the first time Aziraphale has been to his flat; at the moment, all that matters is that it's somewhere where they can shut everything and everyone else out except for each other. 

They cobble together a makeshift dinner of leftover bread and cheese and olives and wine from Crowley's kitchen, and sit, in shirtsleeves and bare feet, with their plates in their laps, on Crowley's angular, uncomfortable sofa, which is still an improvement on the barstools that comprise the entirety of the seating in the kitchen/dining area. Besides, the couch allows them to sit side by side, shoulders and arms pressed against each other; it's really too close to be exactly conducive to eating comfortably, but they make do, Crowley awkwardly picking things up with his left hand. The baguette is a day old, the Kalamata olives are from Tesco and too salty, and the wine is a half-drunk bottle of mediocre red. (The cheese is objectively good though – it's French). Aziraphale seems to savor it nonetheless, closing his eyes and sighing with pleasure. Crowley thinks he understands; it's just the two of them here together, right here and right now, and tomorrow can wait until tomorrow. It's hard to be too worried when he's slouching more and more against Aziraphale's softness and warmth until he's practically laying with his head in his lap, a languid, honey-sweet contentment trickling through his body.

"We should sleep," he says eventually, sitting up with some effort and taking Aziraphale's hand. They make their way to Crowley's bedroom and fall into the unmade bed without turning on the lights. Crowley does not let go of Aziraphale's hand. The sheets are pleasant and cool, the darkness soft, and Aziraphale's hand warm in his. Aziraphale kisses Crowley, a gentle press of closed lips to his cheekbone. It is a small, sweet, chaste thing, nothing like their earlier, passionate kiss against the wall, but nevertheless it's this kiss that breaks Crowley, that makes him whisper into the darkness, "I love you, angel."

"I love you too, dearest," comes the soft reply, "I always have. Since the beginning." 

“Stay,” he whispers, holding his breath. There’s something squeezing his chest. 

“Always,” says Aziraphale. “Always, my love.” He reaches out a hand and tenderly brushes Crowley’s hair away from his eyes, where it has fallen, too tired to defy gravity any longer. The taut, fearful thing that has been wrapped around his heart for months, ever since he'd found Aziraphale again, suddenly uncoils and falls away. He exhales and closes his eyes, and falls asleep with Aziraphale's fingers still running through his hair. 

In the morning, they stand together on the balcony, Crowley’s arms wrapped around Aziraphale from the back, a blanket wrapped around them both. It's very early, just barely dawn, and the fog hasn't burned off yet; the air is cool and smells like dew, with just a bare hint of autumn crispness. The small balcony is crowded with Crowley's plants, splendidly verdant and softly morning-dewed. They watch the sun rise, flaming like anything, in the eastern sky, casting hazy orange light on the spires of Oxford in the distance. Crowley kisses the back of Aziraphale's head; he feels like the world has been made anew, just for the two of them.

Aziraphale turns, sunrise haloing his sleep-soft curls in brilliant gold, and kisses Crowley full on the lips, open-mouthed and hungry. Crowley tightens his arms around him, the blanket falling to the ground; he presses their bodies together, deepens the kiss. It's slow and languid and all-encompassing; the world reduces down to nothing except their mouths, joined, their bodies, enfolded, their hearts, hopelessly entangled with each other. When they finally break apart, it's only by a hairsbreadth, and it's only for him to murmur, a little breathlessly against Aziraphale's lips, "Let's go back to bed, angel."

Much later, Aziraphale makes coffee and tea while Crowley perches on a barstool at the kitchen island and watches him with what he's sure is a sappy, besotted smile on his face. He's left his sunglasses on the bedside table, where they've been since last night and where they'll remain for the rest of the day. Crowley is wearing his favorite white, fluffy bathrobe, which had caused Aziraphale to raise an eyebrow but also smile fondly when he emerged from the bathroom in it. Crowley maintains that everyone should have a robe like that, soft and cloudlike, in their life, and, besides, he might just have a secret penchant for pale, fluffy things. Aziraphale is now the only other person who's ever seen him wearing it. Aziraphale himself is wearing a tee shirt and joggers borrowed from Crowley, both black; they're a little tight on him, and Crowley can't help staring at the way the trousers stretch over his backside as he stands at the counter. He wants Aziraphale to wear his clothes all the time. He wants all his mornings to be like this, Aziraphale bringing the steaming mugs over to the island and leaning over to kiss him, gently, a bare brush of lips against lips. His hair is damp from the shower, and a little mussed; he tastes of Darjeeling and smells like Crowley's apple shampoo. It's all so terribly domestic and so ineffably _right_, and this simple reality is sweeter than seventeen years of dreams.

After two cups of coffee and considerably more than two kisses, Crowley thinks that perhaps he's fortified enough to face the consequences of what had happened last night. He'd turned his phone off earlier in the morning because it had started clamoring for attention every five seconds, which was extremely annoying when the only thing he'd wanted to concentrate on was Aziraphale in his arms, Aziraphale in his bed, at long last. It's practically exploding with messages and notifications now when he finally turns it back on. He thinks that Aziraphale may have the right idea after all, what with his ancient, barely-sentient mobile phone that he usually forgets to charge or loses for days under piles of books and papers in his office.

All the gossip sites, and even a couple of legitimate news providers, have picked up the story of Lucifer and Adam. As it turns out, Adam and his friends have savvily sold the footage from the previous night for quite a tidy sum to the highest bidder, which is a bit of devious bastardy that proves without a doubt to Crowley at least that he really is Lucifer's kid and that, furthermore, he's more than perfectly capable of coming out ahead on his own, without Lucifer's money or influence. There's also a statement from Adam himself proclaiming unequivocally that Arthur and Dierdre Young are his parents, end of story, and that he would never wish to be associated with any family that engaged in such despicable tactics as kidnapping and intimidation. Not surprisingly, almost everybody is on Adam's side; everyone likes to believe that they too would be the normal, down-to-earth, charismatic young man who has principles and is unswayed by the siren songs of fame and money. 

He's not surprised that it's all worked out so neatly. The whole plan, really, had been Adam's idea, and was just bold and audacious enough to be really impressive, but not so brash as to be foolhardy. Crowley feels a flash of pride (dare he say familial pride?) and knows without a doubt that Adam will do just fine in this brave new world, that he'll make of it the kind of world he wants to live in, and that it will be all the better for it.

_The Madame Tracy Report _also has a story on the two of them, Aziraphale and Crowley. It includes the library photo that Bee showed Crowley back in the museum, so he's pretty sure she's behind the leak. Crowley is surprised to find that he doesn’t feel resentful, or angry, but rather oddly proud. It _is_ an excellent photograph after all, and, in any case, it would have come out eventually once the Internet inevitably started minutely dissecting the video footage from the night before. (They don't really appear to do much in said videos except possibly provide moral support to Adam, but such trivial details have never stopped the Internet gossip machine before). Madame Tracy spins the story as a _two houses alike in dignity _sort of thing, and the overwhelming consensus among the commentariat is that Aziraphale and Crowley are absolutely _adorable _and their story of love in the face of disapproval from both of their families is so _romantic_. Everybody loves a good enemies-to-lovers story, after all. There is much speculation in the comments section about how they met, because of course everyone is convinced that it must be a meet-cute for the ages. (Crowley thinks he might let slip to a reporter later that, "well, I literally bumped into him in a bookstore in Paris, and he was reading Kierkegaard, and before we knew it we'd spent hours talking about philosophy," conveniently forgetting to mention that they hadn't spoken to each other for seventeen years after that.) 

He has a veritable deluge of text messages and emails from the people in his lab, and even a few from colleagues and staff that he's passingly friendly with. At this point, everybody in the department has probably seen the stories – there is no place like a lab full of extremely curious and intelligent people _working very hard _(read: twiddling their thumbs and surfing the Internet while waiting for far more diligent (if not nearly as imaginative) computers and machines to run algorithms and analyses) for spreading gossip, especially when it involves someone you know personally. There is shockingly little surprise among the people who know them about the revelation that Crowley and Aziraphale are together. Crowley's postdoc informs him that half of the lab had thought they had been together for years, and the other half had an ongoing bet about when the two of them were finally going to give in to the overwhelming UST and get together. In any case, it was apparently blatantly obvious to each and every one of them by the way that he and sweet Dr. Fell looked at each other that they were in love. 

"What does that stand for? UST?" asks Aziraphale, who is reading over his shoulder. 

"Oh, angel," he says, bemused. "Unresolved sexual tension."

"Oh. _Oh. _ Were we really that obvious?"

"Apparently so."

"Well then, I think we have seventeen years' worth of it to resolve then, don't we, dear? Best get started on that."

So, all things considered, the consequences of the events of last night are far less dire than he had feared. He'd do it all again, in any case, over and over, for a lifetime of days like this one, with Aziraphale.

"What I don't understand," muses Crowley later that afternoon, "is how Gabriel knew where we were all going to be. I mean, I get how Bee could have gotten wind of it. Hastur and Ligur are about as subtle as a plague of frogs, but even they'd know better than to blab in front of one of the Arcangels."

"Bee told him," says Aziraphale, like it's the most obvious thing in the world.

Crowley gapes at him. "I'm sorry. _What_?"

"Bee must have found out from Hastur or Ligur, and then she told Gabriel."

"But why? Why on earth would _Bee _tell _Gabriel_? Explain, angel."

Aziraphale is convinced that Bee and Gabriel are having a secret relationship. He lays out the evidence systematically and assuredly: the constant, over-the-top bickering, the fact that they always turn up in the same places, the way they always drop one another's names into conversations, how they're always glaring at each other, which is essentially just an excuse to make ridiculous amounts of eye contact under the guise of animosity. 

"Nobody is _that _obsessed with their adversary unless they're also in love with them," says Aziraphale with finality. 

Besides which, unless one of them had spontaneously emerged from the ground or materialized out of thin air, the two of them had appeared at the same time, from the same archway, in the courtyard last night, much the same way that Aziraphale and Crowley themselves had. They had also both been looking uncharacteristically disheveled, although the level of dishevelment obviously varied depending on whether you were Gabriel or Bee.

"And then there was that ridiculous scarf. I know I'm hardly a fashion expert, but even _I _know that one does not wear a _cashmere scarf _with one's _running clothes _on a warm night," says Aziraphale, smirking and staring pointedly at Crowley's neck and chest. 

Crowley might be blushing just a little bit, thinking about how he had acquired the not insignificant number of marks there earlier that day, and says, with mock sternness, "I hope you don't expect me to wear a scarf tomorrow."

"I would _never_, my dear."

"Good."

Aziraphale drags a finger down the side of Crowley's neck and along his collarbone, and murmurs, "besides, I rather like the idea of everyone knowing that you're mine." Okay, now Crowley is _definitely _blushing. 

Aziraphale is of the opinion that this whole business here at Oxford is just an excuse for Bee and Gabriel to spend time together, to play some strange, antagonistic yet thrilling game of courtship disguised as rivalry and one-upmanship. Crowley is inclined to agree; it oddly makes much more sense than the two of them going to all the trouble of coming to Oxford for a week just to halfheartedly try to convince a college student that he either does or does not want to join their dysfunctional families. 

"_Fraternizing with the enemy_, to use Gabriel's own term for it. How very fitting," Aziraphale says, rather cattily. 

"How are you so good at this, angel?" asks Crowley, fondly. 

"I am a keen observer of the human condition," says Aziraphale. 

Crowley snorts. "I can't believe your secret superpower actually came in useful for once."

"And also, you learn to tell when people are coveting things they can't have after you've spent seventeen years doing it yourself. I'm surprised you didn't catch it."

"Can't argue with you there, angel." 

"What was it that you were explaining to me earlier? UST? They've got _that _in spades. It's positively rolling off of them. In great big waves," says Aziraphale with glee. "Although come to think of it, I don't think it's actually all that _unresolved. _But regardless." 

"Now that's an image I really did _not _need," says Crowley indignantly. 

"And also, I think we might have a little _insurance _against either of them retaliating against us any further."

It turns out that Crowley and Aziraphale have both, having grown up in their respective families, picked up a tip or two about how to manipulate said families. He's sure from Bee's behavior last night that Hastur and Ligur and Lucifer himself don't know about the relationship; Aziraphale can't be certain but says he'd put money on the fact that Michael and the other Arcangels are similarly unaware. They spend the next hour drafting an email to Bee and Gabriel, wherein they make clear that they know that the two of them are _involved_, and that it would be in everyone's best interests if Crowley and Aziraphale were to be left alone in the future, lest someone hear about how the golden children of the Morningstars and the Arcangels are in a secret relationship. It would be _so _much more scandalous than the same story about the black sheep of said families. Crowley and Aziraphale are both bastard enough to appreciate the delicious irony inherent in the whole situation. 

Crowley is sitting up against a pile of pillows, typing up the email on his laptop one-handed, unwilling to move his other arm from where it's wrapped around Aziraphale. Head resting against Crowley's bare chest, Aziraphale squints at the screen and suggests devastatingly polite and incisively pointed language for the missive; Crowley finds this combination of propriety, cleverness, and pettiness ridiculously hot, especially given that they're both currently very naked, legs tangled together beneath the covers. He presses send on the message, shuts the laptop, and switches off his phone for good measure. 

"There," he says. "Good riddance. Do you think this will get them off our backs?"

"For a little bit anyway. It'll give us some breathing room at least."

"Good," he murmurs into Aziraphale's hair.

"Whatever happens, we'll face it together," says Aziraphale, and leans in to kiss him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the last real chapter – just an epilogue to come.


	10. Epilogue: City of love

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Paris, one year later. Everything comes full circle.

**Paris, 2020**

They go back to Paris, finally. It's the first week in September, the days still warm and golden. The little antique bookshop is still there, and looks just the same as it did when they first met almost exactly eighteen years ago. This time, instead of awkwardly chatting Aziraphale up in the philosophy section, Crowley gets straight to the point and kisses him instead, right there between the eighteenth-century botanical folios and the Latin poetry. He buys Aziraphale a beautiful, leatherbound Shakespeare that collects, inexplicably and perfectly, in a single volume _Much Ado About Nothing _and _Hamlet_. 

They dine at the Ritz, where the food is sublime, and the hidden courtyard gardens in the hotel a delightful surprise. They don't, however, stay at the Ritz, as it is rather dear, and they are still in academia after all; it's not like they can just snap their fingers and have unlimited funds. 

They are saving their money for the most part these days, although neither of them would ever fully give up extravagant meals and small indulgences just for the sake of austerity. Nine months ago, Crowley had given up his modern monstrosity of a flat, sold the uncomfortable furniture, and moved into Aziraphale's place in Jericho. The transition has been shockingly smooth, even though neither of them had ever lived with another person before; they slip perfectly together into a shared life the same way they slipped into friendship, effortlessly and naturally. Which is not to say that are not small annoyances and odd idiosyncrasies to get used to, as all couples discover when moving in together for the first time - Aziraphale leaves ink stains on the pillows when he falls asleep while writing in bed, and forgets cups of cocoa and tea all over the flat; Crowley is prone to tracking mud from the garden into the house and taking excessively long showers, using up all the hot water. Nevertheless, their minor disagreements about these things are generally peacefully resolved with compromises and promises to do better; Aziraphale tries to go around and pick up all his abandoned mugs every so often before the cocoa starts to congeal unpleasantly, and insists that Crowley let him shower first in the mornings. Crowley even decides that he likes tartan, _in moderation_, although he prefers the darker colored ones. 

Their little home is cozy and charming, and he's planted jasmine and roses in the tiny backyard, but the truth is that it's a small, three-room bachelor flat, and not at all meant to fit two grown men, a truly unreasonable number of books in teetering stacks, and a somewhat less unreasonable (according to Crowley, at least) number of large potted plants. Aziraphale has far more bow ties and waistcoats than any man would ever need, and Crowley has at least ten black blazers that he insists are all different; the single, small Victorian closet in their bedroom is crammed as tightly as it could possibly be and can't quite properly close. 

Now that they're no longer yearning for each other the way they were for nearly two decades, they've begun to yearn for other, more domestic things. A cottage in the countryside a little ways out from Oxford, for one thing. Something just far away enough that one could see the stars without too much light pollution when gazing skyward on clear summer nights, but close enough that the daily commute to the university that they both love, with its libraries and laboratories and spires and gardens, is not a burden. Something with a spacious garden that's just a little bit wild, with fruit trees, apples and damsons and pears perhaps, and sweetbriar roses, thorny and fragrant and altogether lovely; in a back corner, a little stone bench half hidden in greenery, perfect for reading or sharing a bottle of wine. Something with a cozy library with wooden shelves built up to the ceiling, brass lamps, and two squashy, upholstered armchairs. A kitchen that one could actually cook and eat in, with a basket of home-grown heirloom apples, red and gold and a little imperfect, on a wooden table. A bedroom full of soft morning light, with French doors looking out on the garden and enough closet space for both of them. A vase full of crimson dahlias by the front door. A photo of the two of them sitting close together in the library, soft golden light falling from above onto their two heads tilted toward each other. A place that will be _their _home, together. 

In Paris, they stay in a lovely little apartment deep in the Seventh Arrondissement that Crowley has booked online. It's on the top floor of an old stone building on a narrow, winding side street, and has lovely, swooping, high cathedral ceilings and a tiny terrace with a wrought-iron café table and two chairs. Aziraphale is delighted to find that they are just down the street from an excellent bakery, and every morning insists on going there and ordering a dizzying array of buttery pastries and far too many breads. His French is terrible, and mostly limited to the names of various foods; nevertheless, he enthusiastically insists on trying, and failing, to speak to people, and everyone is charmed, Crowley most of all. Crowley would help, he really _would, _except that his French is just as bad, if not worse, given that it consists primarily of inventive swears that he'd learned from an angry French post-doc in his graduate lab. At least Aziraphale knows how to order sixteen different types of cakes, even if he can't quite figure out how to ask for directions anywhere.

The apartment has an old-fashioned, deep bathtub with clawed feet and ornate gold taps that they somehow manage to fit both of their bodies into, Aziraphale resting against Crowley's chest, his damp golden curls brushing Crowley's neck. Crowley decides then and there that their hypothetical future cottage definitely requires a similar bathtub; he will learn how to install plumbing if that is what it takes. 

Crowley comes to bed to find Aziraphale already in it, wearing crisp, striped cotton pajamas and smelling softly of French lavender soap, with his reading glasses perched on his nose and his nose stuck in one of his new (old) books. He sets aside the book and turns to pull Crowley towards him, fitting their bodies against each other, and kisses him softly on the cheek and the lips and the tip of his nose. The bed is large, but they still share the same pillow, their faces centimeters away from each other. 

Crowley wakes, warm, to morning sunlight streaming through the windows, in the circle of Aziraphale's arms. His hair is flopping over his forehead, having fallen overnight out of its gravity-defying swoop, and Aziraphale brushes it softly out of his eyes, his touch feather-light, and runs his fingers through his hair and along his scalp. He gently traces the swirling coils of the snake tattoo below Crowley's ear, and says fondly, "Only you, Anthony. Only you would get a tattoo on your face of all places to remind you of a one-night stand."

"It wasn't just a one-night stand," protests Crowley, "and you know it."

He hears the smile in Aziraphale's voice when he says, "I do, love. I do. It was the day I met the love of my life, even if I didn't know it at the time." 

"Do you ever think," asks Crowley, "that we were always meant to find each other again? According to some grand design, a great plan, something like that?"

"Perhaps," says Aziraphale. "But perhaps we had to make it happen." 

"A little free will to help fate along? I like it."

"Have I ever thanked you? For insisting that I have tea with you, that first time in Oxford? For waiting for me? For never giving up on us?" 

"I would have waited forever for you, angel." 

"I'm sorry I made you wait so long. I'm glad you didn't have to wait forever. I love you."

Aziraphale trails his finger down Crowley's cheek. Crowley kisses it as it brushes across his lips, reaches over to pull Aziraphale on top of him and into an open-mouthed, hungry kiss. His whole body thrills to the silk of Aziraphale's skin, the sweetness of Aziraphale's mouth, the fire of Aziraphale's touch. He is warm and solid and real in Crowley's arms, and Crowley is never letting go. It's still like it was that first time in Paris years ago, sweet and wondrous and transcendent, but it's even better now, because they know each other inside and out; they know one another's tragedies and secrets and the mundane everyday things too.

"I love you too," he says.

* * *

They go up to the top of the Eiffel Tower. They're both old enough now that they're (mostly) not embarrassed by the touristy stereotype. In any case, the cliché is worth it for the way Aziraphale kisses him at the top, with all of Paris spread out, green boulevards and slate rooftops and creamy stone buildings, below them, and the sky, blue and limitless, above them. 

They have more than a single day in Paris this time, so they take the time to visit all the museums and galleries that Crowley has never been to. Aziraphale says that their next trip should be to Florence, because the food is delightful and there's a particular sculpture at the Uffizi that he thinks Crowley would like. At the Louvre, they brave the crowds to behold the ineffable smile of the Mona Lisa; Crowley wonders what secrets were really hidden behind that smile, whether someone ever made her break out into a different sort of smile, full-faced and exuberantly joyous. 

Aziraphale gets more crepes, and this time Crowley gets to kiss the sugar off the corner of his mouth afterwards. They pass by Notre Dame, now closed off and partially burnt, its spire fallen and roof collapsed; Aziraphale inclines his head in sorrow and reverence. Crowley surprises Aziraphale by telling him that he is sorry that they never got to go inside together; he surprises himself by realizing that he means it.

They find a jewelry store, a very quintessentially anachronistic Parisian one, and pick out matching rings for each other. Each ring depicts a golden serpent coiled around a silver band of feathers and vines, an intricate and beautiful design. They go back to their little bookshop and put the rings on each other next to the dusty shelves of philosophy books in ten different languages. They've said the words already, hundreds of times, in gardens and flats and library reading rooms and old stone towers and every other place they hold dear, but nevertheless they whisper words of love and promises of forever to each other with only the books as witness. Their hands both shake a little. Crowley places his left hand over Aziraphale's, weaving their fingers together, and holds them up to admire the two rings in the dim, warm bookshop light. From this angle, the two snakes appear to be intertwined with each other in a tangled, complex, unbreakable embrace without beginning or end, encompassing within their coils the whole of the world and all of the past, present, and future.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And we are done! I hope you've enjoyed this fluffy epilogue. Apparently I really like writing descriptions of houses and home decor. :) 
> 
> Thank you SO, SO much to everyone who's been reading, and especially those of you who have left comments and kudos. You all are the best and I love you. This is the longest piece of fiction I've written in a long, long time, and it's really gratifying/flattering to know that there are people who like this exercise in self-indulgence enough to subscribe and read along. <3 <3 <3
> 
> I've had so much fun writing this AU, and this is almost certainly not the last I'll write in this universe. For one thing, I have a mostly-written Gabriel/Bee spinoff one-shot that I wrote a couple of weeks ago and couldn't post, because spoilers. That will go up soon, hopefully. I also have vague ideas for other stories, including more Aziraphale and Crowley, as well, although I make no promises about when I'll actually write those. Feel free to subscribe to the [ series](https://archiveofourown.org/series/1480379) if you want to get notifications when I post something new.

**Author's Note:**

> Playlist for this fic is [here](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0aDRhgtUZUHx4kgVZ6ZDZ5?si=IfhceMwdSTmgSWjSX5TY2g).
> 
> I am @moondawntreader on tumblr.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] Part of the Whole Design by nightbloomingcereus](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23159131) by [CompassRose](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CompassRose/pseuds/CompassRose)


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